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weev 1 week ago
Honestly, I don’t really blame Strike too much, they’re basically just a bank and it is the Australian regulators that are the problem, just as UK regulators are responsible for the horrific screenshot above. But this is the end result of Lightning, where everything shifts to custodial garbage because there’s no decent way for normal people to run a Lightning node of themselves. If he received the payment on blockchain in a noncustodial manner than just saying it is his own money would be MiCA compliant. But custodians are regulated in a way that blockchains are not. And most normal people cannot reliably run a LN node, so Lightning payments become 99% custodial in reality.

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Because of custodial regulation all Lightning wallets are migrating to use Spark, which claims to be noncustodial. But Spark is a central server that sees everything, can block anything and whose claims of "unilateral exit" are at best vastly oversold: (see how even at 1sat/vb and a small amount of users -- meaning small transaction trees -- you already lose 10% of your money, at 5sat/vb you lose 40% and so on). In fact the situation is only getting worse. Before we had a dozen of different custodians spreaded throughout the globe, soon it will be a single proto-custodian controlled by a US corporation.