Subnostr

I'm not suggesting everyone is capable of taking custody of someone's funds, or even that they'd want to, but at what point is it acceptable to stop suggesting the "next new cool custodial wallet", and instead offer to host friend's and families' funds?

Suppose I can flip the question another way...

Does every serious self-hoster that does this for more than as a mere hobby need to become a large public service entity?

Funding immediate friends and family I'm sure happens (I do it), but there should be a #WebOfTrust model (of sorts, perhaps more verifiable) where friends of friends try out some self-hoster's solution. I think if done and decentralized enough, no mint/lightning pool would become big enough worthy of a #rugpull. And even if it happened once, it would become costly to keep trying to do so over time. Further, some form of monetisation could also encourage honesty.

I think this is relevant now due to the emergence of #ecash mints, but I've always held it as an important topic during the earlier lightning days, and I think it's the lack of consideration that made #cashu as an example be created to solve so many custodial problems, many of which perhaps didn't need to be there in the first place.

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Discussion

Low Information Voter 1y ago

Its a good thought.

My concern is the unpaid, unlimited tech support side of things.

I run a mailserver and fileserver and let selected friends and relatives use it.

Extended family will tolerate astonishing levels of fraud and fail by powerful multinationals, but get mad at me for an hour-long outage that happens while I'm on the road.

Sometimes people need to pay for things to value them. And I don't want to complicate close relationships with that. Applies 10x to financial services.

Best if normies have a simple business relationship with a service provider.

Uxellodunum 1y ago

Yes, I completely agree and understand this, for now.

I do think though that given how much of a rise in popularity self-hosting has had in the last years, heck, decade, infrastructure has also improved, will continue to improve, and there's something we can take advantage of there.

By self-hosting I don't necessarily mean it needs be in your home - I have a self-hosted stack at home, but also have one running in a DC with redundant power and internet feeds which I use for "public" use and pay for out of pocket.

Regardless, my point is to go smaller. Let's host for our friends and family, if they pay for ruggable services, surely they can spare some change for upkeep costs whilst maintaining a higher degree of trust.

Stability and keeping downtime to a minimum is something that with time I've come to believe mainly comes down to process. 4/5 times any downtime I have is caused by something I touched. The software in general tends to be stable and works as it should - Have you found the contrary? If so, I'd be curious to know what your infra stack looks like.

Finally, I think it's a vision worth considering as a stepping-stone between general custodial services, and full self-custody.

Low Information Voter 1y ago

4/5 being something I've touched matches my experience, too. The remaining 1/5 is mostly automated updates or security-related.

Agree re the rise of self-hosting, but I'm wary of the "Uncle Jim" model. I think devs should focus on the "small business decides to in-source" and the "small business / contractor offers extra value-added service" models first.