a while ago i came up with a term "second-party custody" - giving someone bitcoin thru a trade of goods/services or as a gift, with an anticipation that they will remain your trusted friend for a while and help you out later, or confiding some of your seed words to someone very close (which is essentially like giving them bitcoin as a gift). second-party custody requires a high level of trust which is more likely on a peer-to-peer basis.

analogy: asking a friendly-looking stranger to watch your stuff at a coffee-shop while you go to the bathroom.

this idea came to me after i successfully convinced a few people to convert a significant amount of funds into bitcoin. i think that these people are more likely to stack harder at the start of their bitcoin journey. my capacity to stack is limited by my time and energy that i put into the world. however, if i have educated more stackers... i now have an army of stackers.

when a bitcoiner is made, over a long enough timeframe, he or she takes care of everyone around them, especially when the values align. if someone was already nice to you for a while and helps you out, having bitcoin supercharges their ability to help out later.

since the value of bitcoin holdings eventually goes to infinity, what should i be doing with my time? the dollar-denominated price is fake, and one cannot put a price on freedom - freedom is everything.

at a certain point i figured that instead of trying to stack more & more sats myself, i should put a lot more time into learning and teaching about freedom tools - how to bitcoin, how contracts operate, how and why natural law works, and really - under what conditions do people act nice to each other!?

TLDR; the bitcoin layer 1 protocol operates best under "don't trust, verify" principles. however, the bitcoin layer 0 (zero) protocol operates best under "trust, educate" principles. you can extrapolate this idea to selecting lightning peers, and really any kind of peer selection that you want to be on your team.

select wisely your peers.