Bitcoin scaling seems to have a huge complexity problem. Lightning barely works today, and cannot perform the necessary transaction throughput for the whole population. Seems like the only solutions being discussed like fedi, liquid, are custodial. I want Bitcoin to be permissionless and non custodial for everyone. I know it can be done. I'm just not sure what solutions exist today, if any. Most likely it's a solution that hasn't been thought of yet.
Discussion
The only way to have fully sovereign Bitcoin with zero trust required is to be running your own node and validating your own transactions. In practice you can hold UTXOs without validating and it works as self custody, but ultimately you still have to get data about the current network state from somewhere.
There are probably 100,000 people maximum who currently do this. And that’s ok - it’s a bit of a technical process which does require some computing resources.
Fedimint and other federated custody solutions are the same dynamic. Yes, you’d ideally like everyone to demand base layer Bitcoin for self custody and be able to do that. But it requires a desire and it also requires resources, and therefore exporting some of that to semi-trusted payment providers like a federation is economical.