Nostr's Zaps and related LUD-16 seem overly complicated to me. Perhaps I am spoiled by ease of use of Ethereum.
Discussion
Let me address the question in your bio.
Custodial Lightning wallets are the easiest way to onboard because the most popular ones provide a Lightning address, which is a hosted URL for receiving zaps. It’s possible to self-host this, but the setup process is beyond the reach of most new users. So for now, until the next generation of Lightning wallets using the BOLT-12 spec are widely available, this is the fastest path to getting zaps and putting sats into the hands of new users.
Everyone should explore other ways to use Lightning, and set up a self-custody wallet with Phoenix, Breez, and others where they can hold their sats with their own keys, just use custodial wallets for receiving zaps, and not store much on them.
I don’t know what use case for Ethereum you’re talking about, because anything built on that is subject to censorship, protocol changes at the whim of developers, and rug-pulls.
Yeah, Ether is a breeding ground of shitcoins. Surprisingly, I may be one of the small amount of people who actually read the smart contract source for some popular stablecoins and promptly vomited, vowing to never touch them again.
And that’s why we avoid them like the plague here. Sound money and mathematically-ensured scarcity is the way. Even if it’s less convenient sometimes.
I personally believe money in general to be a crutch that covers up for humanity's utter inability to build systems based on mutual collaboration (somebody will always take advantage of the trust given to them). But it's surprising that during most of its existence, money was essentially a form of trust (the word "credit" in "system of credit", the way people usually describe current money, literally means trust. How amusing). And that trust, too, was abused — see counterfeiting, hyperinflation caused by central banks printing money to cover up for their government's debt etc.
At least nobody can take my cryptocurrency away from me or suddenly inflate its supply.
Also isn't the 21 million number a happy accident involving the halving mechanism, that was later adopted as one of the main selling points of Bitcoin? 😝 not gonna lie tho, not a bad thing to have it even by accident
ethereum has changed the supply multiple times in the past few years. meanwhile:
There is probably a deeper meaning to 21 that maybe only Satoshi (Hal Finney) was truly aware of but the mathematical beauty of it can’t be understated.
I saw a fascinating explanation once about how each halving produces a perfect symmetry related to the remaining supply. I can’t find it but maybe nostr:npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc remembers what I’m talking about.
