Bitcoin is self custody because you pay for transactions to transact, not to hold it
Discussion
lightning works the same way, btw, on the level of channel opening. fees for transactions are generally not for the parties in the channel. they just have to pay a fee to close the channel. this breaks the "self" part of it because it's a two party transaction but i don't think it fundamentally changes anything.
It seems like a pretty fundamental part of why lightning sucks while Bitcoin doesn't
lightning mainly sucks because the cryptography requires source routing to function, and just look up source routing on wikipedia to read about the scale problems it has. however, it doesn't impact network scaling, only individual nodes in the network, and reliability of payment channel paths (since senders and receivers can pick nodes that are unfortunately offline at the moment the payment executes).
but lightning is great for retail sized transactions of up to 1-10k$ worth of btc. if it fails first time, probably won't second attempt.
Lightning is not great for any transactions & regularly has failures that aren't resolved by attempting things twice
i have had one lightning tx fail in like a year.
i zap money into my xapo bank account via lightning on a weekly basis and it nearly always succeeds.
saying it's not self custody is missing the point because firstly, it's not self custody, it's a network of two party contracts, and secondly, it's not for custody, it's for payments
The thread is way too long but this was how the custody issue came up
it would be ignorant to say that LN is self custody. it's providing a service, which can be just for you, to push sats around instantly without onchain transactions.
That's how I see it too, but over the years I've seen too much stuff like steak n shake calling it "Bitcoin" while not actually accepting on chain payments
And I've seen too many lightning fans lie about doggie coin and Monero to justify their love of lightning
It can be a service, but it can also be a scam, and that's what ends up standing out to me about it
unlike ecash, lightning cannot be a scam. they can't move your coins around unless the onion message in the invoice actually correctly works and all of the nodes are online
it is designed to be atomic, it either works, or it doesn't work, and if it doesn't work, you have not lost anything
what bothers me more is that shitcoiners think that just because "it's not bitcoin" that it's a scam. it's not a scam. the protocol is very well designed and works very well and the biggest risk is you open channels with dodgy cunts and have to pay an onchain fee to force close the channel and maybe you wait a week to get access to the sats you used to do it.
but it's not a scam. this is bullshit. monero, on the other hand, is just 2012 grade bitcoin with extra steps that don't really do anything except make supply auditing impossible.
doge is just some bullshit fork, i worked on one from 2018-2020 and there was no bullshit in it. it's just that due to GPU mining and stuff like nicehash, rapidly the field of PoW coins disappeared as people mined everything and dumped everything to buy bitcoin. and as such, you can see if you just look, that most PoW coins are gone. no matter how well intentioned they were, they just were not as secure as bitcoin, people mined the shit out of them, dumped all the coins and the market said "this shitcoin ded", and usually, all the OGs in said shitcoin threw their hands up and moved on to something else, because they couldn't sell their coins, they were lost. the end.
the only reason dogecoin succeeded as long as it has, is because of musk and because it was a pretty meme. the whole shitcoin scene went all in on meme coins for the last 3 years and basically it's also ded now too.
the reason is the same
people mine, stake, or whatever, they dump the shitcoin and buy bitcoin, and the shitcoin dies. it's not some favoritism or anything, first mover advantage is everything in cryptocurrency, and nothing moved before bitcoin, and so eventually everyone just dumps whatever to buy bitcoin, and everything else eventually dies.
all the aspirations and wishes and dreams of people to make competitors to bitcoin have come to nothing, and in the last 3 years, they have tried to push bitcoin into oblivion by spamming it with bullshit, that was enabled by 2017's segwit bullshit, which is bullshit. but even that shit didn't last long because everyone who made money of it... you know... bought bitcoin. again. the end.
all roads lead to bitcoin. i've been in this thing since 2012 and that was what i saw happen over and over and over again. there can only be one. there can only be one money on the internet. everything else is just a ponzi and whoever gets out first wins.
Lightning is a scam though, like ecash
And it could hypothetically be a service, like ecash, but nobody would use lightning or ecash as services because we already have Bitcoin and doggie coin and Monero, so lightning and ecash aren't needed except for scamming
lightning is a peer to peer payment network.
ecash is a client-server architecture.
if you actually tried running a lightning node you'd understand.
a CUSTODIAL lightning wallet is no different from a CUSTODIAL bitcoin wallet. you are trusting someone. in both cases, the custodian holds the keys.
not your keys, not your coins.
when you run a lightning node, it's two keys involved, but it doesn't change the situation because you can't cheat the other party in the pair without incurrring a bitcoin onchain transaction fee.
and the fact that this is the total risk of it, means it's just one degree less than trustless. where the custodial relationship is 100% in favor of the custodian.
I have tried running a lightning node. Didn't work, and pretty sure I lost sats.
I don't get what you want me to agree with here. Lightning proponents want me to accept them saying "Lightning is Bitcoin" in nothing but contexts where it misleads people, they've never even shown me a context where it's useful to let Lightning use the Bitcoin name. I'm not going to use Lightning when it's not useful to me. I'm not going to call it Bitcoin just to confuse people. I'm not going to get pushed away from Monero or doggie coin by counterarguments that are always false. What's the goal here?