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, I’ve offered an occasional challenge on Twitter/X.

When people tell me Lightning doesn’t 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 doesn’t work.

Every single time, they can’t do it. Because they haven’t even tried it. They’re just talking. I’ve done this a ton of times and nobody ever takes the sizable sat offerings.

In Dan Held’s anti-Nostr thread, Mark Jeffrey was critical of Lightning.

Unlike most who I offer the challenge to as 99% sure they won’t take it, I offered it to Mark despite knowing he had a much higher probability of accepting it, since he’s tech savvy and active in the broad crypto space. But in my view, if he accepts, then that’s 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, I’d 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 isn’t 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. He’s a multi-time published novelist, which with my recent fiction hobby, interests me. So, if there’s 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 “want it to work but…” 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 that’s a shout out to nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wsqzp382htsmu08k277ps40wqhnfm60st89h5pvjyutghq9cjasuh38q7t6dtc who made Lightning convenient enough for Mark, who doesn’t 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 couldn’t. 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 didn’t 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 “But Lyn, Mark used a custodial wallet”, I’d 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 it’s 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 “choose your own adventure” 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 it’s 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 it’s 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 didn’t get back to him. So, after this I got back to him and said I’d be happy to talk about fiction with him to pick his brain, and talk Broken Money on his podcast, and we got one scheduled. 🤝