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.

Replies (4)

weev's avatar
weev 1 week ago
Yes, Spark combines simultaneously all the negatives of both custodial and noncustodial services. Noncustodial wallets introduce additional risks, in that people can lose their private key or have it jacked by hackers. The tradeoff was sovereignty. Spark retains these risks while introducing surveillance and censorship capabilities, meaning that users gain absolutely nothing for the risks imposed by noncustodianship. It’s worse than traditional bank account, where if your credit card gets jacked you report it to the bank and lose nothing, and if you lose your wallet you can go to the bank and get new cards issued and lose nothing. It is, in my mind, significantly worse in architecture than traditional finance.
The comparison of traditional finance is not the barometer- In my humble opinion*. Only thing that matters is "is it 99.99% safe?" "Does it improve usability?" And thats about it. *my humble opinion means that im willing to change my opinion humbly at any time irrefutable evidence is present. Thank you, for reading my note I appreciate your time and effort explaining things.