Because there is no bank in the world which will open account for 5000 Satoshi (1 USD) deposit. And by the way, Stacker new has custodial wallet embedded.
Everybody should talk about lower bound.
pull down to refresh
pull down to refresh
Because there is no bank in the world which will open account for 5000 Satoshi (1 USD) deposit. And by the way, Stacker new has custodial wallet embedded.
Everybody should talk about lower bound.
Onboarding normies is impossible without custodians. The tricky part is ensuring they move out when they reached have a certain amount of funds or knowledge
I think the real trouble, at least for me, isn't the on-boarding part as much as it is the expense of a non-custodial lightning wallet. I live paycheck to paycheck right now, and I'm more than just a little embarrassed to say I can't afford to lock up $100-200 to open a lightning channel so I can transact on my node. The node itself is easy enough, a RaspiBlitz, but even that was an expense. It's a little pathetic, I know, but I hope I will be able to open a channel or two back up at the end of the summer.
That's a situation I'm sure that a huge section of the population is also in.
Heads up. Consider cheaper but good options like Jade.
What's Jade?
A wallet by Blockstream and a miner (that was for fun).
http://jademiner.blockstream.com
That's a good point. Similar to buying a HWW to keep 2000 sats
You likely need this only because we are too early and there are not so many interesting things around to pay with bitcoins so the friction doesn't worth spending time, buying and getting bitcoins non-custodially for non-trivial amount.
There are stories from big European funds when people want to get out of custody their exchange-traded regulated bitcoins. So I think life is richer than experience of most of the people here.
Agree. There's a wide range of custodians (size of custodian, amount of funds, period of fund holding), so different treatment applies. Stacker News is not the same kind of custodian as a bank
Non-custodial channel liquidity needs to be a priority for Lightning businesses & entrepreneurs.
It’s such a crappy experience, downloading the chain, installing the lightning app and attempting your first payment, withdrawal or even channel open and still not finding a route to your node.
Until then, custodial lightning offers the convenient workaround
Or you can use Pheonix or Breez. It's not perfect but it's still far more convenient than what you described.
It is a decent experience. Their current solution may not be viable forever though. They may well be pressured to become even more custodial or be forced to facilitate more customers through their own node setup. I hope it's the latter
Yes but these shouldn’t be chosen out of necessity, but rather out of convenience
Its great for relaying the concept, providing training wheels and getting people in with low friction, but it doesn't mean we can't improve the amount of people who transition towards non-custodial.
Sure keeping 69 sats on a wallet is fine, but if people don't learn they'll be sitting with 69 million sats on a custodial wallet and that to me is a dangerous position to be in
Okay. Let's conduct thought experiment propose "Ethical Custodian" and limit maximal balance with 546 sats. Likely it won't be successful because people do not want to be limited in something a-priory so we return to just business and just clients who demand something.
I think these are two different arguments, mine is if people don't know about the options how are they meant to exercise judgment? If they do and still choose to go with a custodian that's up to the individual
So somebody should take care about those people who can't make judgement? Should we propose "Satoshi Test" for determining if service is custodial and introduce Custodial committee to oversee custodial industry?
It is until it isn't.
Ideally businesses will be building less convenient solutions, storing servers and setting up businesses in more obscure locations. The West could be a big weakness for Lightning Network, in terms of infrastructure. Leading the way, but we can't always rely on rule of law in these jurisdictions to support the globe. As we have seen with exchanges and organisations like Paxful recently. More draconian regs are coming down the pipe with the Restrict act and other branches of it. It hasn't hit home that the very same laws extend to these platforms. It's going to force us to adopt non-custodial Lightning much much more. Starting 2024.
Good example. Agree they have VASP definition for LN banks. Life will be tough likely.
I hope someday SN will offer lndhub for SN accounts. Users could use SN wallet in Zeus or Bluewallet app directly.
Hosted channels and lndhub are a good simple way to onboard new users.
Later they can add more self custodial wallets once they learn more.
I explained here a scenario that experienced bitcoiners should do: LN banks for friends and families https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/bitcoin-private-banks-over-lightning
Nothing wrong with some level of custodial accounts, if the user is well informed.
Also if are not KYC could be a good decoy mode to receive sats with increased level of privacy. As I explained in this guide https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/operating-with-ln-as-a-merchant
I think there is a niche for LNDhub by @k00b after BlueWallet closing. The question if that fiduciary duty is worth having.
this
I have the not so popular opinion that using lightning in a custodial way is fine.
I do wish that somebody builds something like this: a LN wallet that allows to split your balance across several custodians, yet has a UI simple enough that users can also ignore these details if necessary.
With that, we could have people store their small, day to day LN fund across a few reputable custodians, minimizing the risk of a full rugpull and promoting competition across custodians. Add chaumian ecash a la Cashu and you have awesome privacy.
eCash projects promise that. Look Fedimint or Cashu.
It's great that it's possible to custody small amounts at zero margin cost to the custodian. We all kind of take this feature of digitally native money for granted.
But, as we are all aware, it's not ideal.
I argue, this is ideal.
This re-institutes the definition of firm online and allows forming digital markets on permissionless money.
That's the interesting thing about custodial LN. Because it can handle minuscule sat volumes, you can make the third party risk aspect essentially null by never putting more than 10k sats or something in there (as I say with >40k in my alby wallet rn lol).
What is sad is that one day regulators, even if they accept Bitcoin, might try to put the same regulations that exist on banks onto custodial lightning, which would all but kill the things we love it for. Of course, since making a small, private, custodial wallet for peers is so easy, the regulations really wouldn't matter.
They can't enforce the same regs on custodial lighting wallets, because the wallets don't deal with fiat.
Simply move the custodian to a country without that regulation?
Or use a Tor node
Exactly.
If this thing -- the whole btc enterprise -- is long-term successful, there will be a wide array of options across all levels of custodian-ship (?) and trust. You can take a trust-minimized system and add trust requirements in return for a better user experience. You cannot realistically do the reverse, which is why it was so important to build btc the way that it was built. This distinction will matter, crucially, in the end.
Yes.
No. It's taking a shortcut for something that's very hard to achieve.
Sure, it's nice to be able to tip here with a click, but it's basically cheating. Instead of implementing Alby for self custodial tipping, or any other complex solution we might come up with in the future, it's much simpler for the website to implement custodial lightning. Holding Bitcoin yourself is always the goal and we should strive to make that easier instead of building easy "solutions" to complex problems.
Self custody isn't that hard and if we normalize custodians now, suddenly people will wonder "why should I even self custody?"
Why are you against simpler solutions?
Are you agree to hold somewhere in custody 546 sats which is the dust limit?
Do you think that holding 546 sats should be facilitated on exclusively non-custodial way?
Self custody may be hard and expensive. Especially if one departs from just holding keys to running and using full nodes. In Metamask people store funds in self-custody. Does it worth anything though if it could connect to specific web sites only?
Nobody should have a wallet just for 546 sats. Why would you even own bitcoin worth less than a dollar, realistically?
I'm not against simpler solutions. I'm against solutions that compromise basically all benefits of bitcoin.
Here's invite for 546 sats. Use it as you like.
https://stacker.news/invites/clgm4c479000090olog4k9as2
None of the benefits of Bitcoin is compromised here and now since this is purely added value which increases bitcoins value proposition on top of all onchain Features anybody could have for a fair market price.
In my work as a Bitcoin educator, I help interested people to take their first steps into the space and gain an understanding of why Bitcoin is important for them personally and for the world at large. I also help Bitcoin community builders to become educators and share their knowledge with their peers. My focus lies on financial sovereignty, which can only be achieved by holding bitcoin in self custody and using additional tools to reach a decent level of privacy.
I don't think they're all that great. The only good things going for them right now is that the majority of them don't require KYC and you don't have to pay any channel opening fees/manage liquidity.
I don't see the non-KYC part lasting tbh, and it's a risk if WalletofSatoshi/Kraken/etc end up becoming the most well-connected nodes on the network, since it'd be much easier to enact AML/KYC laws.
Agree. But don't you see that KYC etc is part of larger process of expansion of nanny state and shrinking human rights as a result?!
Yeah which is why I believe we shouldn't rely on custodial solutions. I might be able to open an Alby/WoS account anytime now without providing any information, but there's no way the law won't eventually catch up to such services.
Makes sense. That would mean people shouldn't use banks for p2p transactions either.
If you don’t mind not owning your coins
I mind. But Stacker news has some value which is worth more than sats I store inside the website and this is the point.