Spark is mostly okay honestly. The biggest trade off I've seen is that if you do happen to have a provider that for whatever reason is not letting you make the transactions you want, you have to just take your coins and go try another way. They can't rug you, which of course is a heck of a lot better than custodial, but you're still a little at their mercy when it comes to a lot of decision making, including some fee decision as well as, you know, technically being able to censor who you can pay.
In practice the incentives align enough that I think Spark is probably going to be fine for most people, and being able to start getting paid on lightning without needing to open any channels or have any liquidity set up is a pretty major move forward.
I won't say I know it inside and out to really be solid on all the edge cases but having listened to a few decent podcasts and chatting with AI about it quite a bit it seems worthwhile.
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I don't know if a lot of people will be really using Bitcoin ever. I don't see it happening soon. The questions I field from people who are already going off the beaten path more than the average person are still way in the area of quite dumb, and the attitudes are very often NOT the thirsting for knowledge it takes to really build your own infrastructure with it. Especially from the younger generations where attention span just isn't there. Perhaps we trend back better after society adapts to some of the insane parenting decisions and role of tech in child rearing gets addressed, but if nothing else it doesn't seem like it'll be changes I'll live to see.
And that's fine. Bitcoin works very well for small circular economies to maintain their purchasing power and grow without being leeched away from by the financial industrial complex. It can be used more broadly, but if it isn't, it hasn't failed.
Wait
Spark is fine because it's a trusted 3rd party that can't steal your coins but provides a better UX.
so what's the problem with trusting someone elses node then?
It sure looks to me like you've just replaced the trust assumptions on a higher layer. the only advantage being that companies like Spark and Blockstream now have a business model of selling solutions to artificially constrained L1 throughput.
