Subnostr

This is correct, and how I onboard everyone to Lightning. Additionally, we are so blinded to the cost of transactions because it’s priced in to the cost of the things we buy. Paying .5% w Phoenix or Breez is a 5x reduction of buying fees compared to Visa and Mastercard. It’s high time we start breaking out of this “everything should be free” framing because nothing actually is today. You just pay an inflated cost for your goods and services.

The real issue here is the LNURL functionality of a Breez or Phoenix. Zeus seems to be on the right path with that issue though.

Ivan 2y ago

A lot of the world is unbanked and not using credit cards etc and massive fees can be a major blow. So yes I agree Westerners do need to wake up and realize the costs of things there is a lot of the world not living like that. Who will never be able to afford big fees so solutions need to built for those people. Grateful plenty of people building solutions to these problems.

The simple send a decent sized on chain payment to these platforms so you have good send capacity might work for a westerner but plenty of people do not have the funds to do that. The solution of stop using small amounts to bootstrap isn't a solution thats like telling someone to stop being poor.

Also almost no one is offering prices for goods 3-5% less because your paying in sats. So if you do use sats to pay your paying high lightning fees on some wallets plus the embedded cc fees that are passed along to everyone. So its always in your interest to find lower fees. I do agree though some tradeoffs are bad and people need to be educated. We do have a lot of education spreading to do because a lot of stuff is misunderstandings. Again hard problems and I am grateful people who are a lot smarter than me are working on solving them. I have my own home btc/lightning node connected to Zeus and even opened channels to good connected low fee nodes. Self custody is important and can be done with lower fees. Its just not easy at the moment. Each passing year things have improved and are getting better.

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Discussion

aljaz 2y ago

self custodial lightning in its current form cant be a viable replacement for cash for people who operate with tiny amounts no matter how much we want to pretend it is - with onchain fees being high-ish and technical solutions still lacking, sending someone 3$ on a self custodial lightning without existing inbound just doesn't make sense as the cost of just in time channel open from the lsp will eat most of that

my comment was practical, i see people demo-ing breez/phoenix and sending 5k sats without the recipients really understanding the underlying tradeoffs, then next time they want to receive a larger payment new channel is opened again and sats "lost" due to that cost

phoenix is slightly improving that with splicing so at least all capacity is in one channel but the costs are still there

plebiANON 2y ago

There is an exorbitant cost to physical cash as well. Inflation and taxes pay for both the creation and use of it. This is reflected in the price of everything around you. There is no cost free solution to anything, whether it’s covert or overt. As we convert to hard money, the declining cost of goods and services will help to alleviate these issues as well. Unfortunately we can’t just solve poverty by attempting to eliminate transaction costs. There is no great answer other than fixing the money and letting the emergent markets take it from there.