reply on: Is Lightning Scaling Bitcoin in a Way Nobody Predicted?

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @tomlaies 23 Jul 2023 \ on: Is Lightning Scaling Bitcoin in a Way Nobody Predicted? - Bitfinex blog bitcoin

This has led to the majority of current Lightning Network users to employ custodial Lightning wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, Tippen.me, or Blink. Many Bitcoiners believe that self-custody is central to Bitcoin’s value proposition, and see this development as less than desired.

I see this from both sides:

Yes, of course it's not the self custody that we want.
On the other hand, it isn't like people are having their life savings in custodial banks. Having your weekly expenses in a custodial wallet and some Sats in the account of a shop is like having paper in your wallet or a giftcard in your Amazon account.

Not self custody utopia but when the overwhelming bulk in number of transactions is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 24 Jul 2023

Seems to me that a custodial lightning wallet is the ONLY option for the vast majority of humans on planet earth. I certainly can't afford to open lightning channels up, and I can't even understand how it's feasible for me to have to open channels as large as the payment I intend to receive in order to receive payment.

If someone wants to give me 1 million sats but I haven't got a pot to piss in, what am I supposed to do? The obvious answer is for me to use a custodial lightning wallet of some kind to receive the payment, then I can self custody to my own on-chain wallet.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @clownworld 23 Jul 2023

And what happens when people come after you? Haven’t you seen all the censorship and debanking perpetrated by governments, banks, payment companies, smears by political groups, etc.??

Oh, so you can hold your bitcoin, but even though LN is taken everywhere, you can’t use it because all the wallet and node operators and exchanges have to ban you to comply with their overseers…

This is not a small problem. Self custody is a huge and fundamental problem.

5 sats \ 1 reply \ @notgeld 23 Jul 2023

You should know that bott.ly were the first who started censoring LN transactions and whitelisting node pubkeys.

They filed bankruptcy recently.

I agree the situation is not ideal but the bar for competition with banks and payment services is really low.

5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 24 Jul 2023

You should know that bott.ly were the first who started censoring LN >transactions and whitelisting node pubkeys.

If a node does this, can we not also blacklist them for this behavior? Seems like an easy and democratic solution. Anyone in favor of censorship should be censored themselves. See if they don't change their mind rather quickly.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 24 Jul 2023

Haven’t you seen all the censorship and debanking perpetrated by governments, banks, payment companies, smears by political groups, etc.??

Imagine you're in the stone age and want to exchange the fruits you gathered for a tool someone made. This someone doesn't like you for whatever reason and doesn't agree to exchange.

Does it matter how you pay? Bather? Physical cash? Centralized fiat? Onchain Bitcoin? Lightning? Custodial Lightning? No, it doesn't. If they don't want to they don't want to.

Oh, so you can hold your bitcoin, but even though LN is taken everywhere, you can’t use it because all the wallet and node operators and exchanges have to ban you to comply with their overseers…

The option to use custodial Lightning doesn't mean paying with self-custody Lightning is impossible.

Also, again: if they ban you, they ban you. No matter how you pay. Stop trying to break the laws of logic.