Replying to Avatar Guy Swann

(response on Twitter to someone endlessly playing the purity game over having a normie use @walletofsatoshi) 👇🏻

Interested to hear your thoughts or successes/failures in this regard:

"I have a process that has worked really well for onboarding people to holding their own keys, and its ~3 steps. The opening is the most important because 99% of people just don't care or are interested for all of 10 seconds and then forget about it the moment you leave.

The singular reason I have used @walletofsatoshi recently is because they have Lightning Address by default. It isn't even about lightning. If I just wanted to send them a $10 tip and be done with it, then we'd use @PhoenixWallet, which is where I shift them after they have a meaningful amount & want to know what to do with it.

But that's not what I was trying to do, because that's not what *they* care about, it's what *I want them* to care about. Instead I go for something with easy lightning address (which Greenlight + @Breez_Tech might fix in the coming weeks completely non-custodially), so that people on social can tip them. Then they spend the next 2 days seeing tons of zaps flood into their wallet.

The simple fact is, it's exciting. It's interesting. It catches their attention repeatedly over the period of a few days. It keeps them engaged for longer. *Then* it becomes possible to make them care about what it is, and why they should think about it differently.

I think it's me being completely self-centered & have found it completely unsuccessful to boot, to think I can force someone to come at something with *my* perspective or to demand that they care about it the way that *I* do, instead of realizing what is relevant to them and starting from there.

I've been doing this for 12 years. If all you want to do is posture on socials that you are "more pure" or whatever, then go ahead and I hope you get something out of it. But if you want to actually succeed at changing peoples' minds, I'm happy to talk about what has or hasn't worked for me and maybe we can learn something from each other.

No hard feelings. Just trying to get us closer to a #Bitcoin future where everyone can be sovereign and more importantly, understands why they should care about it. You do it your way. I know what has worked for me and I'm always open to suggestions if you have any good ones."

Since when is self custody up for debate? Why not onboard them to wrapped BTC on etherium?

Don't onboard people who are not interested in self custody. They are not ready.

Stop pushing for lnurl and zaps if it's such a centralizing force.

You will end up crossing every red line in the name of mass adoption, just like a shitcoiner.

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I'm not crossing any line. Did you read the post? I'm taking someone who is custodial in literally every aspect of their lives and with money that is completely controlled by another entity on top, and trying to get them one tiny toe out of the door and find a way to get them to be interested in stepping out.

self custody isn't "up for debate" its the entire point. Which I feel I made pretty clear if you read the post.

I bought some of my first Bitcoin from a bank which turned out to be a token and not even real.

I now run 3 full lightning nodes and have more hardware wallets than I can remember.

It’s the destination that’s important. The path doesn’t matter.

Agree. I would simply argue the path requires first steps, and secure cold storage isn’t an introductory lesson.

• No one learns to walk by being thrown into a 5k race

• No one learns to read by starting with the Gutenberg bible

• No one learns to fly by being handed control mid flight to a 747

Education is just naturally a process of small steps in the direction you want to travel. Starting with, before anything else, getting them to WANT to keep learning. This is my *singular* purpose for getting them on WOS and receiving zaps. It isn’t first about teaching them custody, or about inflation, or central banking or whatever. It’s about getting them to realize that #Bitcoin is **worth paying attention to,** so that they have enough interest to want to hear the next steps.

After years of watching people go through shitcoins to get to Bitcoin, and then having friends who even seem to understand all the central bank and inflation issues but I still find out they have $10k BTC sitting on Coinbase, I’ve just had to deal with my naivety in regard to how the average person treats this. I just don’t believe the “onboard someone straight to a Coldcard with a steel plate backup” argument is realistic because I’ve seen it work for all of 0.001% of the time. And even for those that did, it wasn’t because they went from 0 to 100 in their first touch, it’s because they simply had already gotten ~99% of the technological, political, philosophical, & economic background from some other avenue so they were simply lucky enough to be able to skip that part.

I read the post and I'm familiar with most arguments. What tony replied is basically it.

If they need that much hand holding and can only be lured with custodial gimmicks, then they don't really need bitcoin or are not gonna make it.

All those people will either give up or go back to WoS behind your back, just to get rugged in the future.

Onboarding people to self custody on WoS is just a big fairy tale.

You think that what I’ve done successfully with a handful of people since we had zap adoption is a “fairy tale”?

I would also add that I think the LN Address things isn’t a “custodial gimmick” but is actually a crucial feature that *will be* native to Lightning (probably with Bolt12 or similar) but that right now only has quick, easy solutions via custodial. I think it’s actually more of a DNS problem and lack of native LN standard for that purpose. But free flowing, instant onboard zapping with the user not needing to have the app open is a critical goal for Lightning that we just figure out in some form or fashion.

Sysadmin perspective: it’s always a dns problem.

Personally I think it's fine you try to on board people the way you sit fit.

My issue is bragging about it with a pic of WoS and normalizing custodial paypal lookalikes.

How would you react if someone boasted about orangdpilling someone with a screenshot of a binance account?