What’s worse about holding your own keys to your own channels?
I don’t understand why people give lightning such a bad rap
Discussion
Because the UX sucks and there's no fixing it. The architecture of the protocol itself does not allow for better UX.
If the UX is what makes lightning suck. Learn how to use it, or Just wait till you trust someone else’s node and get it all swiped from under your feet. This happened with LNDhub, Wallet of Satoshi, lifPay, etc..
Better user experience doesn’t change the fact that it’s not that if it’s not your rack, it’s not your stack.
If you learned to self custody, you can learn to run a node. It’s not that complicated.
I run nodes. I know what I'm talking about. It's not a matter of learning. I'm not sure you're gathering the fact that my criticism of lightning comes from a deep understanding of it's architecture. It's flawed and
"just learn to make complex transactions, open channels, provide liquidity, loop out if your channels aren't balanced, oh and by the way you need at least a million sats for a couple good channels and it's going to cost you about $20 or more in fees to get to a point where you can pay for your coffee with self custody lightning"
WILL NOT SCALE to the masses. The masses just won't use it. So the problem is, lightnings architecture makes heavy incentives to use a custodian (more liquidity, more channels, better results)
Thats precisely the problem I have with lightning and no protocol update can change that.
Our main problem has been that it's yet-another-server that we run and maintain and babysit, and update and adjust and pay for hosting and pay for channels and then we need it and it isn't working again because reasons...
We hardly have any money moving on the channels and then someone wants to send us a larger amount and it all melts down and then we have to scrounge together money to raise the inbound liquidity and it's like we hardly have any money and we had to spend it all to get a bit more.
I'm constantly being forced to fall back on Minibits or Phoenix. And Phoenix fees are 🤪
Again, You don’t have to raise money for inbound liquidity. All you have to do is ask people to open channels with you, most plebs would gladly to help grow the network!
I don’t know why people’s first reaction is to think that the only way to get inbound liquidity is to buy it.
I don't know how to respond to the idea that banking services are too expensive to buy, so I have to go around begging my friends to help me get some and stay in their good graces, so that I can continue to transact.
This is a flawed system, sorry.
If you think this system is flawed, wait until Phoenix wallet disappears from the App Store in your jurisdiction. Sorry too
The ability to self host lightning does not absolve it's flaws. You can self host Ethereum too.
To be honest, this whole ordeal is making me think Alby Custodial is actually a really good deal.
Alby no longer has custodial. Alby hub is pretty awesome though to get NWC with your own node working pretty flawlessly and get a lightning address.
They have Alby cloud, which is custodial
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I believe it's technically non custodial. Your keys, their cloud for your node. Is the key ever held on the cloud?
i would open a channel except i don't have a public one to make that worth something
gotta have a decent stack to do public routing, it can be a slight loss at times
The whole idea of having to have "channels" was such a bad mistake imo… having to have "liquidity" seems so stupid…
My issue with this 'yet-another-server' is that all of this stuff is new and doesn't have classic production qualities, or even have a version contract yet. Even OneDev is good, but I still staple the container version because sometimes he release incompatible minor or patch versions that are within contract. So you can't automate these things. This is why large companies have so much manual IT staff. I know so many people in this field now, literally manually installing certificates and even Windows updates from rdp. IT sux and nearly impossible to automate without risk of massive outages.
AlbyHub is still very experimental. I have no problem running an apg-get upgrade after a manual audit because nearly everything managed by Canonicle will usually be very stable, and the tools we might use from their prod repo will abide by production quality version contract. Meaning nearly no risk of massive downtime or corruption.
So basically every server we have to deploy is experimental, which means manual backups before and after, continuous babysitting for crashes, that can't be fixed and needs an issue to be created with the maintainers, manual version checking, package stapling, and monitoring.
For example on OneDev about 3 weeks ago he just dropped support for SQLServer which I rely on heavily. Had I just run a normal container upgrade it would have just stopped. Now my release path is blocked until I migrate away from SQLServer and stand up ANOTHER mariadb (assuming it' supports maria) and now have even more services running that I have to backup, prune and whatnot.
So much this.
I run nodes too. I help my friends and family pay for things and earn sats with lightning. they do use it, and when they are ready to self custody their own node, I hope there is block space left for them.
I’m not saying to scales to the masses, HECK BITCOIN WONT SCALE TO THE MASSES BECAUSE THERE ARNT ENOUGH UTXO’s!!
All I’m saying is, I’m personally scaling it to my own inner group of peers, lightning is working, and no one can take it from me.