Dude it's been an issue on pretty much anything I've used. Custodial and non. Lightning always finds a way to make me bearish đ
Discussion
Seeing all the bears in Tennessee this week screwed me up.
Yeah welcome to the club. LN is a pain I gave up, especially for zaps. I just settled with coinos (despite their issues ive been fine). If we need to move enough sats that a custotial option isn't safe, on chain is 10000x less complexity, work ,effort you name it. I still have a node running, but originally i was uncomfortable storing that much captial in a hot wallet, tied up in channels. Most require 1M, and even with nostr frens its still not worth it to open smaller channels.
I'm not sure what the aim is at this point. Because it doesn't seem like it's retail normie focused at all.
It's for corpos to make money routing Bitcoin payments for plebs.
Makes quite a bit of sense for lots of transactions, I could see it being worth it for a business to run a node, if they handled anything close to retail level transactions, We run one, but AlbyHub takes care of most of the complexity by relying on their servers, and their liquidity loans I believe. I know we didn't have to do any looping or liquidity loans so that tells me they are doing something on our behalf.
I don't really have a better solution. The UX is just shit for me half the time. I'm sure it all would be better if it could be. I'm skeptical of broad adoption though. At least for any stack that isnt completely controlled.
Same here, and I think most bitcoiners not drinking the cope agree it's not good unless you have a ton of time, patience, and a few m sats (which could be like $2000-5000 now) just as a minimum.
I suppose the amount of sats for self-custody would be fine for many (not overall but I'm willing to excuse it for now). It's all the other bullshit that disinterests me. I spend more time troubleshooting the thing than using it. I guess I just don't see the point of it all if we centralize everything all over again. And that's the only way I see most people using most of this stuff as it is.
Yeah but it's tied up in LN, so it's only useful in LN, which is great, but on-chain is more widly accepted than LN at the momet. It's just limiting, and yes I know of services that allow for easy LN to-fiat, but its not as easy as sending on-chain.
I'm not opposed to that necessarily.
Did you ever run your own node? Been running mine for years and I rarely have any trouble transacting even with larger payments. LN has it's caveats, but once you have a few channels established transacting becomes an absolute non issue.
I've used Zeus. It wasn't great. I've never experienced Lightning without issues at some point, custodial or otherwise.
It could be that there's a lot of up front suffering to get through?
Either way, it is bearish for adoption in my opinion. I want to replace the legacy system but I'm also disillusioned by it all lately. It's awesome when there aren't problems. But the biggest problem for me is the totally unhelpful nature of errors in most of the software I've used. I really don't want to learn Lightning from the ground up to use it smoothly in a free way. Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe it isn't possible to have that. I truly don't know. But it seems like "no issues" has a pretty high price tag as things are. Again, maybe that's just the nature of it.
I guess I just always imagined a future where average people can easily setup and use freedom and privacy focused tools without deep understanding of each tool. Like I don't have time for that shit on top of the actual work I do in the real world. And I don't think I'm asking for too much. I could just be asking for it too early. Or there simply isn't enough interest, funding, developers, etc. Maybe I will have to focus my real world work on this instead, but that can't be the case for everyone forever. At some point, a surgeon has to be able to just use the tools freely without spending much time on the tools. Otherwise, we're just spinning our wheels in the mud here. Frankly, there's usually a lot of low key gas lighting anytime someone brings up how shit the UX is. Did you do this, and that, and remember there's this and that. Cool, but that is how this stuff remains irrelevant. Ideally, we should see less of that over time. And I think we are in some ways. I haven't for Lightning though. At least not if I stray from custodial to custodial payments.
I'm really good at what I do in healthcare. I don't want to spend time away from that working on the thing I use to buy coffee. I just want it to be reliable, secure, and private. I don't feel I get that using massive custodians. That's hardly better than the legacy system. A bit maybe. But noncustodial has been a total shitshow for me.
We âare still earlyââŠexpectations for bitcoin to operate like the modern financial world out of the gates isnât realistic. Remember when ATM cards first came out and there werenât any ATM to be found, or when you did they didnât connect with your own bankâs network? Even today, try depositing cash into an ATM that isnât your own bankâs branded ATMâit doesnât work.
Like most people, you donât want to think about money from a perspective of logistics and mechanics. It should just work, and thatâs fine to view it that way, but improvements are ongoing, especially at this point in time.
What led me to respond to your post was the idea of not needing to know how privacy and security works in order to use it, is a common principle. Few can explain how a common door lock works, or the tines of a key, and yet the still they carry keys and use them every day. *The principle of the key* is #modulo's raison d'ĂȘtre.
The UX of #bitcoin and the #lightning network isnât seamless, but we have come so far, so fast, I am optimistic.
I fully admit that it truly could just be that my expectations are too early. And some of that comes from what I hear people saying versus what my actual experience shows me. I think there's a lot of cope preventing reality from being faced fully, which likely slows things down and could lead to centralized services winning out. Maybe that's natural for emerging tech. This is the first time I'm living through something so radical. I remember pre-smart phone days but even that isn't the same.
I wanted to zap your response but got this. đ I'm working on keeping an open mind and laughing where I can to enjoy the process of being an early adopter. It's hard sometimes, but what else can we do?
