Yeah on-chain works because it's on-chain, no doubt about it. That is hard to compare.
Unfortunately the fees are ATL now so the benefit of LN is not to be seen that much.
For zaps the best would be
@Minibits (but it's dependent on Google firebase afaik..) or zap directly (yeah, not NWC so it's one more step on mobile to go thru the LN wallet directly).
Lose sats, but how?
Only you can loose with Cashu not able to redeem tokens so they ending on behalf of the mint or closing channel and broadcasting wrong state. This is what I'm aware of.
With
@npub1xnf0...lpr5 wallet I just keep open few fat channels to some available nodes and this working for 2 years with no hassle - except for liquidity sometimes, that is to be expected.
If I need avoid this could go with centralized nodes (WoS/Phoenix) or use the wallets directly.
I agree, it's not straightforward:
1) the many options possible with: invoices (expiry time, reusable, one time use, hold for period of time), the channels (LN nodes for SCID and Simple TR are hard to find) and LN addresses.
2) the networking: need for public static address and DNS dependecy (the domain) is what many does not have in options (time and skill). And the NWC is another layer of complexity.
3) user need to have significant stash to use LN in meaningful way with seflcustody - fortunately Cashu solving this.
What bothers me most is reality - there's almost nowhere to use it (same for on-chain). Not because it's a bit difficult to set up and manage the economics of having locked sats in LN, but mostly because of regulatory hell(?). It's not at all good for me to pay via LN (strong privacy by default) if I need to register myself before the QR invoice is ever presented to me. Almost all payment gateways are just processors that exchange sats on the fly for fiat, so the counterparty doesn't use BTC at all anyway.
BTCPay hard to find.
