Replying to Avatar counterweight

Sometimes I worry because:

1. To use Bitcoin as a day to day currency, Lightning is absolutely fundamental. Whoever proposes on-chain transactions as the day to day transaction engine clearly does not pay a lot of things with Bitcoin and has never set up a retail store with it.

2. Using Lightning in a sovereign way is anything but easy. We can't expect the common folk to graduate in Systems Administration just to have a reliable payment medium.

So, combine 1 and 2 and we are either unable to scale Bitcoin as a currency or we can only do so through custodial options. I think this is a serious problem.

I'm hopeful that technology will appear to enable great experiences that are sovereign at the same time, but for now we can only throw people into Wallet of Satoshi and the likes.

Curious to see more points of view on this.
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Seth For Privacy 2y ago

I do think sometimes the difficulty of Lightning is overblown because people think they need to be a routing node, balance liquidity, etc. when they really just need a couple inbound channels for receiving and a few unannounced outbound channels for sending and call it a day.

I setup my channels once and haven't touched them in months!

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counterweight 2y ago

Even a simple wallet node like the one you describe requires a lot of work if it has to support the day to day payments of someone.

It's not a nice experience to be out in the wild and find yourself not being able to pay because your LNbits instance silently went off, for example. Keeping the uptime and liquidity up and ready always (99.9%) instead of mostly (95%) is difficult for normal plebs in my opinion.