#bitcoin is permissionless. You can use it however you want to, but it means that you have to put up with it being used for whatever purpose other people use it for. In the meantime stay humble and stack sats.
I consider that the very definition of optimism.
GM plebs! One thing I love about living in #NZ is that we’re a day ahead of everyone else. So I can be first to say:
Happy Halloween!
Happy #bitcoin whitepaper day!
Happy birthday to nostr:npub14mcddvsjsflnhgw7vxykz0ndfqj0rq04v7cjq5nnc95ftld0pv3shcfrlx! 🎂
Here is a picture drawn by my very talented daughter (13). 
Deleted the app months ago. Never been on Twatter in any meaningful sense. Nostr is where it’s at. It requires work to get the same CX but effort is rewarded, I find…
What’s even better? I get to sleep like a baby rather than worrying about which direction the market’s heading. For Bitcoin there is only one direction and that’s up.
[insert “old man shakes stick at sky” meme]
I’ve been raising my kids on a diet of old movies. Zulu, Spartacus, Roman Holiday, The Thirty Nine Steps, The Italian Job, North by Northwest, To Catch A Thief, old James Bond… The list goes on. There’s lots of good, original, old material out there that doesn’t come across like the recycled cat urine of modern cinema. How many fucking Marvel movies can be made, FFS?!
nostr:npub1g0atme30l6s65rw6ulq2cqahq9lzmpj0sejhsjcqh0azlyg5cp4qf7gqpz already summed up a lot of the concern but i wanted to point out some more details.
hopefully we understand the Bitcoin keys part: you have control, no one can spend the coins without those keys.
LN is made up of payment channels, which are an abstraction built on top of a time-locked UTXO. the decisions about that bitcoin are now shared, with methods for both parties to leave the channel and reclaim control over their portion of the "shared" bitcoin.
this immediately opens the door for fraud. a bad channel partner is in many ways incentivized to steal your bitcoin.
okay, so choose a good channel partner.
but what is your goal with using the LN? if you want to pay someone/some entity that you know and can see face to face, a Lightning channel is overkill, with a lot of pointless complexity. just settle your tab, tell your friend "i owe you one," etc.
but if you want to be able to send Lightning sats to strangers, you need to be well connected in the network. currently that means opening channels with large Lightning nodes.
these nodes are essentially banks, but because we want to avoid the idea that we're recreating problematic finance, let's euphemistically call them "Lightning Service Providers."
so these LSPs collect fees for the service they provide, like a bank. and you can say, "well they're a Bitcoin business so they want Bitcoin and Bitcoiners to succeed, but they have bills to pay, so this seems fine."
they do indeed have profit motive, but that means that open channels need to be worth it. open channels cost money to monitor and manage.
is it worth it for them to have a bunch of tiny channels with Bitcoin minnows looking to avoid on-chain fees? not really, a small channel doesn't do much to support routing payments and they won't collect many fees.
so it's good business sense to avoid having certain users as channel partners. a centralized entity can say "no, you don't get to use LN," or if they were your channel partner, "you don't get to use LN anymore."
"but there are other LSPs."
with similar incentives. and those that seem more willing to open channels with anyone, or charge less in fees, could very well be looking to steal your bitcoin at the earliest opportunity.
even a well-established LSP from one of the "good" Lightning companies could decide to snatch and grab a bunch of bitcoin and exit to L1, and you'd have to be monitoring your channels like a hawk to avoid the loss. (this is another problem)
as BTC price increases, it becomes harder to use L1, and there is a stronger incentive for Lightning channel partners to steal your bitcoin.
LN replaces the trustless machinery of mining to enforce the ledger with implicit trust of channel partners, many of which are indistinguishable from banks.
Thanks for the explanation - very useful and succinct. Could the counterparty risk be mitigated through the use of watchtowers?
One lesson I’m taking from this is - don’t put more sats into your lightning channel than you are willing to lose. Makes sense really - in the same way that I don’t carry $x,000s of dollars in cash in my wallet (my dad always did this- I have no idea why). Or how I keep a low balance in the bank account tied to my debit card…
The #Queenstown Trails Trust has been doing excellent work recently, building a network of #MTB trails that crisscross the region’s mountains, valleys and rivers. This is the latest addition, an epic swing bridge across the Kimiakau, funded generously by bike-mad locals (including at least one billionaire).
#GN #outdoors #NZ https://video.nostr.build/c189529ca388b1fd97da40f7374ba0eaa4b4b4a516b406f2570085936ed98b8a.mp4
And I think you might just get it. GN!
The New Zealand dollar / #bitcoin exchange rate reached an all time high today. Bitcoin’s value hasn’t changed, of course, inevitably meaning the NZD’s value has declined.
Keep calm and stack sats.
I’m intrigued by this statement. Care to explain?
But that’s true also of a bank account, too. And at least with the lightning middlemen there’s no debanking risk. Win-win, I think.
Curious- what’s in the packages?
