I read a lot of finger pointing and blaming others but very little introspection. TLDR we are a way off users being able to mass adopt.

OP by their own admission runs an Umbrel and is a Linux user. By default, this is an advanced user, deep down the rabbit hole and with the tools needed to enjoy bitcoin to its fullest (lightning + lightning address).

The reality is, though, that this is hard to set up and nothing that someone today is used to when they compare to their current financial setup: open bank account (because they want and need one), then download app and log in. Often this is the same process, now.

Custodial services can replicate this, and hence dominate (Cash App, Coinbase, Strike), but non-custodial still presents many UX hurdles.

Increasingly, with time, I am observing that a lot of this responsibility sits with developers’ choices of what they expose to the user and the language they use to describe what is happening. It’s technically bamboozling to someone trying to adopt.

And that’s before we get into Lightning liquidity and whether or not to use Cashu, Spark or Ark to mitigate the downsides.

Haha, sounds scalable!

I’m working on this.

How the hell does anyone type that bitcoin ascii symbol, anyway?

And the dunking on LNURL really discredits this post. A group of bitcoiners willfully rejected something that found market fit because they’re not fans, and then promoting the same thing but worse.

There’s much of the “gist of the idea” to agree with here, but it’s still impractical.

Agree

Indeed this guide is very good. Some elements could be clearer but we have AI now.

I see two main advantages, even if not running a routing node:

1/ speed goes up noticeably versus a tor only node.

2/ if you open even just a couple of public channels, payment reliability jumps considerably.

As others have said, but in overly complicated ways, this is very achievable and you can do it. The first time you set it up might feel unclear but you’ll get it quickly.

Rent a VPS — any VPS. Ideally you pay for that VPS with Lightning. Check out https://bitcoin-vps.com/

Install Wireguard, fail2ban and ufw.

Setup Wireguard tunnel between node host and VPS. Open port 9735 on both sides. VPS side if you’re not familiar with IP tables etc, you’ll need to use chatGPT, but it all lives in the Wireguard config (wg0.conf)

Once tunnel works, edit LND Conf to broadcast VPS IP.

Done.

I don’t understand why, when he had Bitcoin and the terminal accepted bitcoin, the payment had to be made in arbitrary stablecoin. Square and Cash App did the hard work of removing the dollar. Where is there demand for what David is demoing?

I felt sorry for the Design guy who David gives 30 seconds of airtime before wanting you back on his ego.

That’s his son

Christ, bit touchy aren’t we, tubby?

Taproot being a huge mistake and relatively new, storing large amounts of coin in a tapscript isn't aligned to a risk-averse strategy either.

This is hilarious and ridiculous FUD given the bitcoin you deposit with anchorwatch is literally insured.

Thanks. I’m self hosting Alby without an Alby account, on the default LDK mode they spin up. I have only one private channel to a node I know. I’d have assumed this AlbyAuth thing should not be activated? I’m very concerned by the view transactions etc. I’ve not even got to the “own lightning address” or lnurl part yet.

Surf’s Up :(

Exactly. Matt, Marty, NVK and friends went from privacy advocates to money men. They're like that evil pastor cult in the timothy dalton james bond movie. "Send us your sats, we love freedom!" but we're balls deep in our Strike investment and pushing its custodial platform everywhere because we need it to work for us financially.

That's because every ten31 investment gets a pass on being custodial, compromising on bitcoin, etc. by ten31 vcs, lps and friends. That whole crew are unfortunately falling prey to the entire industry they said they wouldn't be: shill the portfolio, push one narrative, say one thing in public and another in private.

Bitcoiners are eyes-wide-open people; stay that way. Keeps things in perspective. SN is great. Primal is not good for nostr and fundamentally a mediocre product. Custodial LN can be OK for small amounts. It's all 21 million shades of grey, in the end. Just don't fuck with consensus.

Well this AMA went well

Thank you. I definitely feel a lot more work can be done in fee automation and fee algorithms. I’m excited for that future.

This is indeed where I’m starting to land (build own software). I’m not technical but maybe it can be vibe coded ;)

I suppose I could, but LNBits is another “50-tools-in-1” solution that I find unwieldy and huge overkill for a simple feature, like AlbyHub.

Every time I’ve used LNBits I’ve wound up deleting it and migrating to a single purpose GitHub repo from a kind bitcoiner.