Odds are you are a bitcoin larper....and sadly when it comes to Lightning we are all bitcoin larpers.

We pretend to care about the fundamentals of bitcoin, but 99% of us only use it in a permission-ed and custodial way (Alby, Wallet of Satoshi, Phoenix, etc)

AQUA - while not as good a true self-sovereignty - is better than most of the single custodian solutions.

I mean if you think fedimints are a good idea, there is no philosophical differences to L-BTC.

Yep, its a weird history.

I've long used Green and while Samson was employed at Blockstream there was also AQUA (this is like 2019?) which was available on their website and had source code available.

Then when Samson left Blockstream, AQUA seemed to disappear and suddenly Green got better features (LN with splicing, etc).

Now AQUA has appeared again with L-BTC + LN + splicing. Ha.....

I'm not exactly sure why they don't just combine efforts. What is the point of these dualing wallets from closed aligned people?

No.

L-BTC only comes into existence when it is backed by BTC. There is no independent supply of L-BTC aside from that.

Its fundamentally no different than a fedimint from a practical perspective

Yes, I completely accept the idea that "it works / doesn't work" depending on your perspective.

Downloading Wallet-of-Satoshi and topping it up with sats and using that to buy things certainly "works"....

But from a regulatory perspective (and I hate saying this), but 99% of these things "don't work". Probably even SN (much less WoS) are in violation of money transmitter laws / kyc laws and could probably be shutdown at any time.

This is really what I meant by deluded. We bitcoiners are telling ourselves that "LN works" but what we really mean is "the way we're using LN has escaped regulatory scrutiny thus far".

My heart is on the side of LN self-custody and I really want this to work. But self-custody of LN seems to be very far out of reach. The thing that makes me sad is this is not the case where I have some "if only we could've done ABC"....I think LN was a smart solution (and maybe the best), but I think we need to admit that it doesn't really work.

I increasingly feel we need the "Satoshi of Layer 2" to arrive - meaning that Satoshi came out of the blue with a fresh idea on how to solve the distributed consensus problem that hamstrung ecash / bitgold / etc. He did that not by inventing something new wholecloth, but by cleverly combining existing ideas into a new workflow. I wish this was possible now, because I almost feel we've wasted too much time going down this LN path only to now realize its not really workable.....

LN is largely unusable (from a bitcoin first principles perspective of self-custody)

I'm not a hater, I've used BTC for 10+ years and LN for the last 3 or so. But the complications of using it (and then adding NOSTR into the mix) makes it very difficult to get started, unless you are willing to spend hours researching, setting up nodes, copying complicated URL strings, dealing with multiple overlapping services (LND + LNBITS + ThunderHub, etc), troubleshooting, etc.

There is essentially no chance casual users and businesses will ever adopt it. In the end, LN will likely only be used as an interchange network and/or be used in a custodial setting.

Again I'm not hating, angry, nor wishing ill on the project. I do however think its necessary for bitcoiners to face this reality and stop being deluded.

If you want a chance to see things from fresh eyes. Find a friend and suggest they download alby extension and offer to walk them thru it. I don't mean your grandma....I'm talking about someone who is under 40 and of average technical knowledge. You won't get very far....

If in the future, all we are able to achieve is that LN users utilize it in a custodial way, then that is still a marginal improvement over the current fiat system - but those custodians are still going to be under the pressure from the state and legacy financial system.

Its a nice writeup and I think CTV is interesting from a theoretical perspective, however these types of statements give me pause:

I have no idea how you coordinate "everyone can simply sign a transaction" - or does he mean "each participant can simply sign a transaction independently" ?

Watching HN completely miss Bitcoin has been a fairly interesting experience over the last 12 or so years.

In part I think their anger is related to the collapsing returns within tech industry itself. "Silicon Valley Life" was the former gold rush that is now sunsetting....the industry has metastasized into a handful of kingdoms and growth is falling into traditional late-stage growth curves.

They should have seen it coming - and they know that. The internet developing its own native currency that displaces traditional system was an obvious tech development, but somehow they missed it.

But there is another - deeper change - that has happen. The "tech industry" itself has moved from being a very libertarian place in late 80s / 90s - to now a deeply state worshiping place. Its quite ironic (and they seem completely blind to it) that 99% of the tech they worship, was developed out of a mistrust of central authorities.

remember that the maximum number of transactions the bitcoin network can support per year is something like 220M. Thats a pretty hard cap.

So even with something like LN, that implies that only ~110M channels could be opened / closed in a year. And this assumes NO OTHER onchain activity. (yes those LN channels may have dozens or thousands of transactions each, but well....complexities of channel management will take its toll eventually).

Certainly things like CTV will help, but even if it expands by a factor of 10x its still not that great fit for global population.

I think the right way to look at BTC is base-level settlement layer (ie. replacing central banks), but for day to day we still we need custodians.

Certainly onboarding is going to require custodians. Just work thru the math, how would 50M people each get their first .00001 bitcoin?