I'm persona 2.

But I'm a big fan of the fact that newbs to Lightning (or bitcoin in general) can sign up to Stacker News with just an email, post some content, and, if the community finds it valuable, get their first sats that way.

I'm becoming convinced that until the next bull run for bitcoin, adoption is going to be driven by content platforms. Zapping and tipping sats is a brilliant use-case for Bitcoin, but it has a chicken/egg problem: creators can't receive sats if their audience doesn't have them. The way SN's wallet works right now solves this by allowing people to join the community (and the economy) without the fairly heavy friction of buying Bitcoin.

It works for SN particularly well because the content is bitcoin-themed. But the internet is full of other message boards and I've been doing a lot of thinking on how to pitch the SN model to these folks, because if we could start people on replacing their likes, upvotes, and karma with sats...boy, oh boy.

(Honestly, NOSTR could totally benefit from the SN model. Imagine if you could tell a normie about NOSTR, get them to download a single client, and start zapping them.)

So, all of this is to say, I hope you don't get rid of the custodial option. It's an invaluable tool for bringing in newbies.