The bank replacement infrastructure is being built now. In order to build it, companies need to be formed that will serve the public in a way that they can understand and also feel perfectly safe using. Without this “consumer first” thinking, it will not be possible for bitcoin to replace Fiat and banks.

Therefore, everything that is put in front of the consumer must take the consumer’s level of intelligence and understanding into consideration, and the gears never put in front of them. Anything that is confrontational, requires learning, or that will cause any kind of psychological distress to the user should be eschewed.

Thanks to decades of learned understanding of how to approach the consumer with digital products and offerings, it should be, in theory, trivially easy to construct services that will serve the consumer in a way that they can understand that does not require them to read a book or an instruction manual.

Apple has demonstrated this over and over with all of its software and hardware product offerings and services that are trivially easy to use and don’t require understanding on the part of the user and can be set up instantaneously. Any business that wants to address the consumer on a scale of billions of people needs to take their cues from Apple.

This also means that the dogmas of the “bitcoin community” cannot be taken as the ultimate rule for how things are done. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, whether or not lightning is custodial or not; what matters is utility and access to lightning on top of any service that has been built. For certain on-chain self custody of the private keys is doable, achievable and should be done but lightning should not not be issued simply because it is non-custodial or that the difficulty in making it non-custodial is too great a hurdle. It is perfectly reasonable to have on chain bitcoin as the bottom lever of the storage device that’s being offered to the public, with a lightning layer that is custodial being used to facilitate small transactions as required with a third-party like Wallet of Satoshi handling all of the gears that make that happen. as long as the consumer has ultimate control over the on chain bitcoin, it is more important that utility of instantaneous payment through lightning is made available to billions of people who do not know or care about self custody.

Utility of bitcoin is what matters, and that utility, ultimately, is the replacement of fiat money, first and foremost, and then afterwards self custodial features that allow bitcoin to not be confiscate-able,

Remember also, that the entity that does the confiscation of bitcoin in theory is the state, and without fiat money to run the organisations that do the confiscation, it is not possible for them to confiscate at all. Anything therefore, in the hierarchy of requirements it is more important that bitcoin replaces Fiat in the hands of billions than the solution that makes that happen being perfect. The utility of bitcoin being a replacement for Fiat is more important than feature perfection. This is why custodial bitcoin at the base layer and non-custodial bitcoin as the facilitation layer is an adequate compromise in order to jumpstart and midwife, the global billion user bitcoin economy.