Right. I'm not comparing bitcoin to fiat though, I am comparing bitcoin to our previous iteration of sound money, Gold.

Yes, it is possible to self custody, but will it be possible forever? Maybe for you and I, because we already own nice and shiny UTXOs.

Again, if most people only interact with bitcoin through custodians, we risk the slippage into the same situation. Sound Money held by few > Paper Promises > Paper Promises eroded > Paper Promises revoked.

Not only is it likely, it's definitely going to happen. But as I said the reply below, if we end up in a situation where you either own your own UTXO, or someone else does, and most people are in the "someone else" camp, I think we have a chance to the entire value bitcoin could bring to the world slip away.

I think we're on the same page with this, at least in that custodial solutions are inevitable, and that in our current state, we'll fine equilibrium somewhere between sovereignty and custody that makes the most economic sense.

My individual concern is that if we are not able to find a way to move the slider more toward self sovereignty being possible for more people, bitcoin ends up no better than gold in terms of being "sound money."

If you're a fan of Lyn Alden (or even if not), this is one of the ideas I've internalized most from her writing. Why did gold fail, and why was it replaced by paper and eventually fiat? The demand and velocity of payments required a different technology. This force centralised gold into the hands of fewer and fewer, and the paper promises into the hands of more and more. All that remained for fiat to take over was to sever the redeemability of the paper to the gold. That dynamic can play out with Bitcoin too if we're not careful.

Not sure I want to wade into this one fully, but, I think you misunderstand the capability of the Lightning Network to provide scale.

Yes, it can provide an "unlimited" number of transactions. Lightning does an amazing job scaling the number of payments between parties that have a UTXO. Also yes, it's conceivable that the cost of opening a Lightning channel will be worth the cost, even on an individual basis, for quite awhile longer.

The problem isn't about cost, exactly (though the issues are related). The problem is throughput. It is the sheer number of UTXOs required to use the Lightning Network this way. We simply cannot make enough Lightning Channels for individuals, at scale, to have ownership over their bitcoin with a self-custody Lightning UTXO.

Arguing about cost isn't going to change that fact. You may be fine with this, and it's an arguable point, but what you're really saying is that custodial solutions are the way most people will use bitcoin going forward.

Yeah, thanks, I'll do that.

Sure thing, I' be happy to connect your friend with the community here. We have meetups in every major city these days, and a major event that hops around the country every quarter. Next big one is in beautiful Queenstown on March 1. Easiest way to reach me on nostr (npub19zvj4ssnqjn8v37qq0ha76q22vf4venhkuxdw75ehszujqayjuqspdz3fd) or at the same handle @btcnautilus on X and Telegram.

And thanks for adding us to your site by the way. I've used it quite a bit myself, great resource your providing there, I commend you for the obvious mountain of work you've done there. We're trying to do the same (as you've noted), but we have a ways to go to catch up to you!

I'm an expat myself, coming from the US about 8 years ago for the fiat job. Luckily, got myself in a position to stay and quit that job! The bitcoin community is not huge here, but very strong, and we punch above our weight I think. The power of meetups is what precipitated that change, getting connected to the community and getting some like minded friends is a game changer.

Yep! Thanks. That's my favourite thing we've done so far for sure. The best excuse to have less cash in the bank I've ever had.

Yeah, I think the biggest issue is getting people who are just "buying bitcoin" to think about it at all. I have a healthy relationship with my UTXOs and could probably write up a decent effort at how to do this well in our context, but the bigger issue is getting people to think about it all.

We've considered everything from nice and tidy warning messages when people are buying a little bit of bitcoin (say less than 500k sats, maybe 1m) to brute force, where every payment from our app goes to a self custody Lightning wallet whether you like it or not.

We're still in the territory where an every day, first time buyer of bitcoin could potentially mint a longer-term economically viable UTXO (after spending ~$1000 NZD). But every move up makes it more likely our users will be creating UTXOs they won't be able to spend in the future.

We need to start with what we can do with education now, but I think, ultimately, this will require hand holding where we tie in a wallet UX that makes sense an just guides the user through good decisions around this.

Nice! Thanks for that. I'll dig in.

Working through my third week after quitting my fiat job and going full time on Lightning Pay. Amazing feeling being able to dedicate myself to building a bitcoin business that's sorely needed (and missing) in New Zealand.

We've been operating for about 9 months now, and are now facing our first bull market problems! Hopefully our big plans don't get delayed too much. Main goal this week is to keep working through some of our product questions about how to better integrate our fast fiat rails to improve the sat stacking experience with Fiat -> Lightning -> Cold Storage and back for spending.

Definitely an interesting idea.

I had a similar thought when we were watching the Canadian trucker protest, and the subsequent mess around donations.

I thought, rather than a centralized donation point, and a mess around distribution, how might you just get a bunch of the protestors to create wallets and make them available for donations? You could easily split payments to each Lightning wallet.

The big problem here is verification of the destination wallets. How on earth would you stop random scammers from signing up for an airdrop every time there is a cause receiving donations?

On a small scale, this could work by someone lending their reputation. “I personally know these 10 Indonesians.” But in a large scale (a country, for example) I can’t work out how to solve that problem.

I know there has been a lot of noise about this issue, but in terms of my self interest, my nodes will continue doing whatever is currently default.

When I do update, the full rbf flag will have no bearing on any of the use cases my nodes are used for. So, I won’t bother one way or the other. I imagine most node runners will be like me.

The problem we face in NZ is that while our community is growing, today, we’re dwarfed by the crypto crowd by an order of magnitude, and dwarfed by those who don’t care and will jump in on CBDCs by another two orders on top. We’re growing, but we have yet to impact the general business/consumer landscape here in NZ.

The “blockchain nz” groups have money, interest groups, and industry communities.

As of today, we’re sitting ducks for this.

I’m jealous of the stories I hear from others about their experience onboarding merchants and individuals in other countries. When I talk to local businesses here in my area, I generally don’t get a negative argument, I get “I can’t be bothered, don’t care.”

Where do we find the hook? The problem to solve that gets people to overcome their apathy?

Don’t mean to be a pessimist, I believe Bitcoin wins in the end, just voicing that we have a LONG way to go here in NZ.