As much as I love lightning and Bitcoin, it has a fatal flaw. Complexity.

I’m pretty darn technical and even I can get a damn lightning wallet set up on a node. Now I know this is 301 level type stuff, but it’s not the least bit intuitive and damn near impossible to just fund a freaking lightning wallet to even begin to open channels. I shouldn’t need to open a bajillion channels to fund from my BTC wallet to my Lightning Wallet on the same node!

Can anyone please explain what I am doing wrong here?

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You are early

Exactly this^

It will only improve over time because the market demands it!

But there is a delicate balance between market demanding it and it being built so the market wants it. As Henry Ford once famously said, if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse. Innovators sometimes have to innovate so the market knows what original thoughts/ideas are possible out there.

Excellent point

You’re early, and better products are being built.

I’ve been having those thoughts recently too, but one idea eased by mind a bit.

In America, 90% of all fiat transactions are settled using four payment providers. Visa, American Express, Discover, and Mastercard. These are companies which typically charge 3% plus $0.30 per transaction, provide little to no final settlement assurances. Nobody who uses them understands how they work, nor do they really car.

I think great self custodial peer to peer Bitcoin payments apps will be built, which will scale Bitcoin to 8B plus daily users. But for a moment, let’s imagine that they aren’t.

Even if you just convert fiat payment infrastructure to Bitcoin final settlement rails, you’ve still improved the system immensely. Most users would be trusting, most wouldn’t understand the system, but they would know two things: there are 21 million Bitcoin, and you can easily audit the supply. Just those two changes would obsolete fractional reserve and force institutions to either live under a Bitcoin standard or risk blowing up. We are already seeing this play out with companies like Swan and Celsius, where Swan survives and Celsius implodes in under 4 years.

Final thought, have you checked out Phoenix? Big step up over Cash App in terms of self custody and almost as friendly to mainstream users imo.

Edit: so many typos. My fault for trying to clean and type at the same time ☠️

Fatal flaw?

Yeah, no-one outside us early adopters and nerds will want to use it if this is so complex. I don’t care how convincing we are of the ideology if the technology is too difficult to use. I work in IT and I am telling you, the Computer Chair Interface is nothing more than a dumb hub…the average user doesn’t like hard. They struggle with opening a word document or remembering their email password or sometimes even creating calendar invites. This must be so simple a toddler can do it. Think Apple. How can we expect worldwide adoption or reserve currency when we can’t get the world to adopt it because the complexity of it is too much?

Here’s a way to run a full lightning node on mobile with a decent UI, decent UX, and almost all of the channel management in the background.

https://phoenix.acinq.co

This is fair but let’s face it most people are not going to run lightning nodes.

True, but also as people get more into it and the tech does evolve, it has to trend this direction. I can see projects like what nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m and nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8 are working on moving towards an “Apple-like” self custody/hosting solution.