I kind of knew this for a long time but honestly, I think only a small fraction of the world will ever actually hold keys to their bitcoin. As unfortunate as that is, at some point we will definitely have to accept the possibility. And as much as I hope that as we continue to grow and scale, software such as fedimints will be able to empower local communities, I have a sad feeling the world is going to devolve into more of a panam style situation where the top class (who own bitcoin in this scenario) live in paradise city states with all the technology and convenience and then you'll have the lower class no coiners living in mud huts and being pissed on.
I have no idea, honestly, but there are a couple things I know for certain:
- The vast majority of the population will never own the keys to a UTXO
- The LN while amazing, cannot scale indefinitely in a noncustodial fashion due to on chain costs. Those who will enjoy LN will be the ones who get in when the channels make economic sense to open.
- The governments and current oligarchical entities are going to try to do everything possible to keep as few people from holding the keys to UTXOs as possible. Especially after they realize the true threat of Bitcoin. I do not think there will be a 6102 or whatever, but I do think that they will try their best to limit the amount of people that can hold keys. This is why there is a sort of reverse incentive to get next-block tx fees as high as humanly possible. There is a non-zero chance this whole ordinal thing is a test psyop.
Bitcoin truly is a lifeboat and the Titanic is sinking faster than we all expect. Stacking sats at sat/cent parity will be extremely annoying for newcoiners at that time as they will not be able to economically hold their UTXOs.
To be absolutely clear, I do not think this is a flaw in Bitcoin. I think this is a challenge that needs to be solved in a non-lazy cypherpunk way. Custodians are not going to be the appropriate solution.
Also, fuck drivechains.