The other day on Twitter/X, I paid out a 2,100,000 sat or $1,700 USD Lightning bounty.
Over the past couple years, Iāve offered an occasional challenge on Twitter/X.
When people tell me Lightning doesnāt work, I often ask them in random comments for their Lightning details so I can pay them in the next 5-10 minutes on the spot, permissionlessly, wherever they are, with this payment method that supposedly doesnāt work.
Every single time, they canāt do it. Because they havenāt even tried it. Theyāre just talking. Iāve done this a ton of times and nobody ever takes the sizable sat offerings.
In Dan Heldās anti-Nostr thread, Mark Jeffrey was critical of Lightning.
Unlike most who I offer the challenge to as 99% sure they wonāt take it, I offered it to Mark despite knowing he had a much higher probability of accepting it, since heās tech savvy and active in the broad crypto space. But in my view, if he accepts, then thatās also evidence on the spot that it works.
He declined my 21,000 sat offer and politely still talked anti-Lightning.
So, I said since I like him, Iād up it to 210,000 sats. He still declined and talked more anti-Lightning. He spoke about how he *wanted* it to work, but the problem just isnāt solved yet.
My inner Nostr Lyn couldn't help it, so I upped it to 2,100,000 sats, or $1,700+ USD, if he would just post a way to pay him on Lightning within the next ten minutes. Nobody had ever taken me up on my challenge, so I pressed to my highest offer ever just to see, out of sheer curiosity. Heās a multi-time published novelist, which with my recent fiction hobby, interests me. So, if thereās someone I want to claim the bounty, might as well be him.
And then you know what? He did. Of course he had a Lightning address.
He went from āwant it to work butā¦ā to digging through his past experiences and finding an old Lightning address, within a few minutes. The first person on Twitter/X to accept my challenge.
I paid him 2,100,000 sats on the spot, or $1700+ USD.
He provided a Stike address, so thatās a shout out to nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wsqzp382htsmu08k277ps40wqhnfm60st89h5pvjyutghq9cjasuh38q7t6dtc who made Lightning convenient enough for Mark, who doesnāt understand or particularly like Lightning, to finally call my challenge and make me have fun staying poor, lol. And it worked flawlessly despite being an above-average sized Lightning transaction.
I then asked Mark if he could identify the sending wallet, but he said he couldnāt. He asked about block explorers to identify the payment, and while I pointed him toward Mempool Space, I highlighted that Lightning tends to make sending privacy pretty good even though I didnāt maximize privacy on this one. I'm not deep into the weeds on privacy tech, so I'm always genuinely curious just to ask "hey, can you identify any privacy leaks here?"
I also asked him if he would have shared his bank details publicly like he shared his Lightning address. He said of course not.
So even if people say āBut Lyn, Mark used a custodial walletā, Iād say that this tech stack reduced his friction and boosted sender privacy.
I think there are still improvements to make of course, particularly Lightning combined with other scaling methods (ecash, Ark-style stuff, and so forth), but itās a powerful glue that connects a lot of things together.
In addition, when it comes to payments and small amounts of working capital, there is an important āchoose your own adventureā aspect. For small amounts, in safe jurisdictions, custodial Lightning is not that big of a deal, like keeping cash in your wallet that is prone to theft or loss. It maximizes UX.
But itās important to keep pushing hard, keep developing, keep providing capital, to make as many tools as possible available for people that need to maximize privacy and/or self-custody. Not everyone needs or wants those capabilities for every single payment, but they do need the *option* to turn to them when itās important.
Mark Jeffrey then reached out to chat about fiction. Last year he asked me to go on his podcast to talk about Broken Money, but I fell behind on Twitter/X DMs due to bandwidth constraints and didnāt get back to him. So, after this I got back to him and said Iād be happy to talk about fiction with him to pick his brain, and talk Broken Money on his podcast, and we got one scheduled. š¤
