When onboarding friends and family, there's the wish to provide them with something that's self-custodial and not too complex. For people that are starting slow but will keep stacking in the future, we cannot just recommend them to stack 10k sats or 100k sats UTXOs. Since they're stacking for the long term it doesn't seem responsible to recommend them that.
So there comes the Lightning Network. They could stack there and swap out eventually when they reach 1-10M sats. The thing is, Lightning (in its self-custodial form) isn't really fit for this use case. Because to receive 100k sats, you first need to get some inbound liquidity from LSPs that sometimes isn't even 2x the amount you're receiving. So at best it's good for your next 100k but then you'll have to do something onchain again.
And you can always open channels to them yourself. But it's hard to predict who will stack hard and who will just forget about it. Also it puts some responsibility onto your node's uptime.
What I'm doing lately is recommending something like Wallet of Satoshi. As some kind of entry level test. Because if you have to explain onchain fees, UTXOs, channels, and inbound liquidity to a newbie, they're going to run away. Then whoever passes the first test might get a channel from your node or at least from an LSP on a self-custodial wallet.
And in general, LN is not good for stacking. If onchain fees were off the roof you would struggle to resize or open new channels while growing your stack.
So what's the way of scaling Bitcoin so that hundreds of millions of people can save in a self-custodial way?
Maybe multipeer channels make things better, where people in the “spending more than saving” part of their life could peer up with others doing the opposite. Or maybe it's something like Fedimint.
But on the other hand, should we be worrying about this now? Onchain fees are soooo cheap (as cheap as possible actually).
What do you think?