Strike and WoS are wildly popular among bitcoiners, but also wildly centralized and custodial. They're convenient, but you trade for that convenience with your liberty, privacy, and responsibility. What gives?
Discussion
It’s a balance. I love WoS, understanding the shortcomings and acting accordingly. I’ve had no luck with my own lightning channels, so I’d rather outsource it (for now).
I tried maintaining my own lightning node and found it onerous, and did make me appreciate how easy centralized services make it look.
I have frequent seasonal power outaged and in consequence my channel partners punished me with unilateral closures. This experience, the fees, the necessary knowledge, and maintenance involved made me hope for an improved layer 2 to see instant cheap and anonymous payments become easier to truly self-custody and operate.
As a result lf this experience I learned to appreciate again Bitcoin's base layer.
Same. Rebalancing was expensive, time- consuming, and unprofitable for me.
It was such a drag to see behind the wizard of Oz's curtain, and subsequently realize that worldwide lightning liquidity depends on just a few mega-nodes. Layer 2 improvements are such a necessary thing for further adoption, but I also understand many devs are thinking outside the box and hard at work on this. I appreciate what they do.
Right. I think if someone has a few bitcoin then it could be worth it, and with the right network it could get close to "set it and forget it," but for smallish channels... not with the time. I was disappointed because I wanted to support the network and grow adoption locally.
All valid. Phoenix/Breez/Blixt are awesome self custodial options. Unfortunately they don't work too well hosting something like a lightning address....yet. it's coming though
As a Breez user I encountered the same restriction. Is this an inherent limitation of non-custodial wallets? Would you know how this problem could be solved or where one can find how much progress is made on this?
It's a problem with mobile lightning nodes because a lightning address needs needs a webserver and that webserver and relies on DNS which only works well with a reasonably stable IP address. With a node setup at your home or busines or wherever, it's pretty easy to setup a self custody lightning address.
Having taken the route of self-custodial/self-sovereign from Bitcoin to Lightning, I can see very clearly why people would use WoS and friends; it is much, much easier - by a whole lot. Even now, there are aspects I still don't get regarding channels, to be honest.
The biggest driver is simplicity. It wins, by default. It's easier to just install an app and be immediately ready to go, compared to bootstrapping an entire full node with the whole blockchain taking a literal week to download and then fumbling around with CLN and plugins (which was my route, I didn't look much into LND to be honest) and finally arriving at a wallet, that looks good... but only half as good as WoS to be honest and fair.
Lightning is very complicated imo - it's learning curve is steep and the amount of times I had to backtrack between LNBits docs and C-Lightning docs was intense, just to get a rough understanding of what things really are. And thus, I can see why people would use a simpler alternative.
That said - I fully agree with you regardless. Bitcoin was - from what I have seen, read and heared - ment to empower the individual. Everyone can run a node, even on somewhat cheap hardware (I run mine on an SBC, in fact) and thus, everyone can partake. Lightning was ment to be a much speedier way of sending bitcoin, but being on a higher level introduced other complications. However, working through it is rewarding and gives you full control over basically everything. But getting there requires very good understanding of a terminal, services, process architecture, permission management and subsequent hardening (and I am very sure mine isn't perfect by a longshot). So, while everyone "can" do these things, not everyone "could" (for the lack of a better term at this point), which is very unfortunate and why WoS and friends (need to?) exist.
Then again... How many coiners still use birdapp, instagram and other centralized services? It's sometimes convenience, and sometimes habbit, I guess o.o