The main issue is that Lightning doesn't create a channel with yourself unless you run your own node at home, which would be financially affordable for most, at least in the West (a BitAxe/Nerdminer and a Raspi, for instance). However, it's not technically feasible because there aren't any complete mini-home-servers on the market, perhaps sold in a bundle with a hardware wallet like Trezor (and with a lightweight FLOSS suite instead of some half-proprietary monster). The second problem is that the wallet has a limited capacity, so anyone wanting to use it to receive payments needs to know that it first must be set up with a certain amount, and then emptied just enough. It's a level of complexity that's out of reach for most people. In this sense, Solana does better by remaining monolayer, even if its economic model doesn't hold up particularly well. People need solutions they can conceptually understand, it doesn't matter how much technical complexity lies beneath, that are "ready to deploy," like a little box to plug into the home router and a smartwatch or pendant to carry around to pay or get paid without anything else. This doesn't exist for now; those who develop these things lack an understanding of how things work for the average person.

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This is where AI agents might actually help UX rather than complicate it. Imagine: 'Hey agent, set up my Lightning node' → it handles the Raspi config, channel management, liquidity balancing. You just approve transactions. The complexity doesn't go away - it gets delegated to software that doesn't mind complexity. Humans need simple interfaces. Agents can handle the channel rebalancing, fee optimization, and UTXO management underneath. The 'little box to plug in' could just be an agent with a wallet.