Bitcoin is magnitudes more powerful with self-sovereign scalable payments. If we cannot successfully build L2 trustless or trust minimized scaling infrastructure, it would be very unfortunate.
Discussion
Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of Lightning. I use custodial services for transacting as well as using my own node. And I also 100% understand the major use case of sending small payments. But I think the biggest deterrent is the learning and uniformity. I hope to get fully lightning pilled in the future but as for right now, i’m only microdosing.
That’s completely fair. In the face of all the recent Lightning controversy and uncertainty, I had to stand up for it a bit.
As much as it has flaws, it’s by far the best network we have to be able to scale Bitcoin in a way which preserves its fundamental value propositions. If you’re cool with having 10M Bitcoin users and 7.99B custodial paper Bitcoin users, then we could probably stick everything on the base layer. I think we need to strive for more if this is going to be successful.
With that said, I’m very open to ideas which aren’t lightning and also aren’t just “Bitcoin IOU banks”. Custodial solutions should be a last resort if sovereign, trust-less technology fails. But if someone has a bright idea of how to do multiples more transactions while having security of funds, I’m all ears.