Nostr Web Client

Busy Sunday for me so far, kicking off #SkepticismSundays a little late!

The goal of this thread (which I'll post weekly on Sunday's) is for discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Bitcoin.

NOT the positive aspects of it.

Discussing things with a critical thinking approach and level-headed discussion helps us learn where Bitcoin and it's community can improve and go from there. We had a *fantastic* amount of good conversations last week so I can't wait to see this week's!

What's gotten you thinking, has you concerned, or always irked you about Bitcoin, its ecosystem, etc?

geodesic 2y ago

Im worried that Lightning wont be adoptable by the masses. Is it really practical to think every person on the planet will have access to their own lightning node or maybe has an 'uncle Jim' who hosts a node for friends/family?

As a Bitcoiner I like to think "oh come on, running your own node isn't that hard". But when I stop and think about humanity as a whole... you know, the farmers, cab drivers, factory workers of the world... I don't see that happening. Im afraid 99% of humanity is going to end up using a custodial service like WoS.

Please convince me I'm wrong. Please convince me we aren't building a 'Bitcoin standard' banking system.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

<old>cypherhoodlum 2y ago

Do you think people should roll their own "lightning service" or is it enough to just hold their own keys but use some LSP? Because I see a growing trend of non-custodial lightning wallets with a LSP built-in and I'm not sure what to think about it. It's a reasonably good hybrid model, I guess? For people who absolutely cannot run their own node.

geodesic 2y ago

Afaict, the LSP for those wallets still holds the lightning keys, even if the on-chain coins are still non custodial. So the lightning funds are still custodial. I'm not sure which wallet you're talking about though. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Yeah, in a perfect world everyone would run their own node with their own keys, but I don't think that world will ever exist. Most people can't even manage a WiFi router. And... I honestly love Lightning. I'm not a hater. Just skeptical.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I'd still like to see some scaling solutions come to Bitcoin protocol. To become money, Bitcoin needs to scale, but every way I look at lightning, I see a new banking system. And I hate banks.

<old>cypherhoodlum 2y ago

I'm referring to the Breez SDK. I've got the impression that the gist of it is to offer easy-to-setup LSP to wallet creators and the keys can actually be held by the users. Guy Swann did a read on it not long ago on Bitcoin Audible. My knowledge is limited to that pod on the topic but it seemed like a solution to this problem.

geodesic 2y ago

Oh really? Thats encouraging! Time to go educate myself a bit on how Breez does this. Thanks for sharing.

I love open source:

https://github.com/breez/breezmobile