After all the discussions we had about on-chain privacy and the negative effects on the privacy of ALL users when identities are tied to a BTC address you have to put it on the front of the profile?
I want to be able to at least opt out of this!!
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Replies (113)
Lemme just ask. Do you have a lightning node? If no, why not? Too much capital requirement? Too hard in general? Running a lightning node is almost like a full time job if you want it to actually work right and get bigger.
That's exactly the problem. If it's too much for a normies to run, we need a different solution.
Do you understand the obsession with shaming ETFs? Why? It's the same thing imo. Bitcoin you don't own. Just like with a custodial lightning wallet.
No, pushing people to custodial solutions is the short sight.
"you can just buy the ETF" is meeting them where they are.
This compounds the issue, it doesn't make it better. Separately, I'm a fan of graduated wallets. Ecash, custodial lightning, liquid, on chain...
I'm not saying it can't be a stepping stone, but for most people it's good enough and to me that's not good enough. The whole thing is pointless if people aren't actually holding Bitcoin themselves. In that case, we've just reinvented the old system.
Not with halfway competent self-custodial either. I agree there is lots of incompetent self-custodial tho.
Yea, I think this is the common experience these days. It’s certainly not evenly distributed - there’s lots of terrible lightning experiences out there. But the fact is it’s very clearly possible to make better, so it’s time to put pressure on the developers shipping bad experiences, understand where their applications are going wrong, and help them get to where we know they can be.
I used to have a lightning wallet.
Have not got it fixed since I got a new phone but can easily spin one up if I truly needed to
I just do not feel a need to as I can easily utilize lightning directly from strike or primal wallet or Cash App or river
Again you guys are falling into the “perfect is the enemy of good”.
Lightning and the custodial solutions are not perfect but you guys calling it a failure and discouraging people from using convenient custodial solutions to hold/spend $100 are completely delusional
And comparing custodial lightning solutions on the markets to ETFs vs onchain bitcoin is quite a bit of a stretch
We can agree to disagree
How people use Bitcoin will look completely different depending on where they live and their levels of wealth. Shaming people for utilizing custodial lightning solutions is not benefitting anyone other than shitcoiners who claim Bitcoin is a failure
Lightning sucks
That's the problem with lightning... It takes lots of money and time and education to run a competent self custodial lightning node.
Onboarding to lightning isn't onboarding to Bitcoin either since lightning is designed to promote third party deposit custodians
What self custodial? There are like 2 usable software options...
And only one good one 😂 (CLN)
Who said anything about hosting a routing node? That’s not what I was talking about at all…
+1. mine is just a wallet at the moment because custodial is 100000 easier for nostr zaps.
I didn't say anything about hosting a routing node either...
It still takes a few open channels, at least $1000 in liquidity, an always on reliable PC, to have even a semi reliable node for sending and receiving payments...
That's way too much effort for someone to just be able to send smaller Bitcoin payments instantly. So they use custodial. That to me is not the adoption I want to see. That to me is the same kind of adoption the ETFs drive.
I'm not shaming anyone for using it. I'm just telling them the facts... It's not your Bitcoin. Same as the money in your bank.
lol no I mean a mobile app with lightning built in.
Like Zeus? It's probably the closest thing to something good. Phoenix wallet too. And Muun right? Or did they close up shop too?
Remember Mutiny? They couldn't make it work. People don't want to open a wallet and say you gotta deposit $100 first and we're gunna lock $20 of that forever until you exit, it's going to cost a few bucks from chain fees to even set it up.
Lightning has protocol level contraints that are huge roadblocks to a normal person using lightning custodially. That's all. That doesn't mean I think lightning is bad or useless. It's just not the instant fast payment rail for the every day man. That's all.
New bolts help / can help with the not always online nodes I guess. To me a lightning node should really always be online, never offline.
Just a huge headache to me. No one said it was easy tho.
Have never seen an issue with Strike, just works... In fact, dont think i have ever heard from a bitcoiner in person of lightning failing for them, in the last 4+ years since I started using it.
Not the whole truth. Not everyone can do that and not everyone knows how it works. But by making the UX so inviting you are advertising that possibility. People will notice it before we find a way to stop it.
You completely ignored his argument about opting in, which you could have addressed through the UX, and distracted with exaggerations instead. The way you're pushing this makes it look like you have an agenda.
It's not about the provider. It's that on-chain just works. Lighning requires, setup, config, management and maintanance. With bitcoin the block chain handles all of this for you.
Do not disagree.
But also nothing wrong with having some sats in a custodial solution to spend and support bitcoin circular economies.
Calling lightning a failure is just going to discourage more vendors from accepting bitcoin
It is a step to onboarding to Bitcoin and certainly better than Venmo or Zelle…
Also better than a shitcoin like xrp or nano
The lightning hate is counter productive…
I didn't call it a failure. And there's nothing wrong with a few sats in a custodial wallet. They're just not yours is all. Lightning is a meaningful improvement to Bitcoin.
Than just go with Monero FFS
You want privacy? Use Monero
Lightning is counter productive, the hate isn't
So we are generally on the same page then!
Go look at some of the other comments though
What exactly is counter productive about lightning?
And you were responding and supporting comments from people who were spreading a bunch of nonsense FUD about lightning
Vitor and Alex Gleason think lightning is such a failure that they decided to be retarded and implement on chain zaps…
Promotes third party deposit custodians, thus tricking people into not moving onto hard money, and delaying progress for so long Bitcoin might die as a result
It’s not tricking anyone 🤣
Who is selling lightning as an alternative to onchain bitcoin? Lightning has always been sold as an extension of bitcoin that allows people to more easily use it as a medium of exchange.
Lightning does not replace on chain bitcoin
You retarded enough to type that sincerely or just retarded enough to be typing dumb shit on purpose to annoy me?
None of the constraints you raise are required for lighting, they’re just things people did to make simplified versions of the economics of an LSP work out. An LSP putting in a bit more effort, or conjoining the wallet with a graduated wallet design, makes it way more doable.
The contraints I'm talking about is having a channel to make payments which requires locking up a big chunk of liquidity to make small purchases.
Everybody wants privacy when once own security is at stake.
Custodial in this case destroys privacy benefits that LN could offer and it will keep people dumb. Trusting third parties forever.
What are people's options for "deciding what to do about it"?
Inviting it by making it obvious whether people know what they're doing or not is promoting it.
Lightning works 99% of the time, ackchually...
yes if you're actually using a lightning node and not some weird custodial shit it works wonders
Guess I am retarded because I typed it sincerely and thought it was an appropriate rebuttal to your nonsense 🤷♂️
Have a great day sir! I will continue to use lightning despite it being a failure
I disagree, you could do a graduated wallet, or you could have an LSP that locks up less liquidity and charges comparatively higher fees. Of course in that case the LSP would never need to charge more than on-chain - you still get *some* “compression”.
I just want to highlight a potential logical fallacy to you all. Every time normal people, of which there are no small number, document their problems with Lightning, there are always people chiming in “I run my own LND node and things work just fine!” Or “if you use $x everything works great”. But the presented app $x is never the most widely deployed services. Paul Sztorc’s criticisms of LN are based on his claim that it fails at scale, and that the more people are on LN that the more problems it is going to have, up to the point where it becomes catastrophic as there is not enough L1 bytes for any significant number people to open channels or exit to the L1.
Well, the vast majority of vendors using LN are using different apps. And if Square is having these problems of scale and people using it are constantly reporting failures, there’s two possibilities. The first possibility is that Jack Dorsey and everyone at Square is absolutely fucking incompetent and have halfassed their LN deployment. As well as everyone at Coinbase (failures on LN deposits to Coinbase are extremely common). Or the other possibility is as that Paul Sztorc is correct, and aspects of the LN protocol seem to invite failures as a greater number of people are using the service. I only see people who process very low numbers of payments in nonstandard configurations saying LN works great. Everyone I know that is not deeply involved in Bitcoin professionally seems to think it has serious problems.
Then you're not really criticizing any particular constraint, are you? You're criticizing lightning itself, but the year is 2026 and I don't see too many other scaling solutions around the corner
You made it to the bird app, helping shilling some shitcoin :)
Working on one with Jan 3 right now bub. There's also ark. And while I may be critical of lightning please do not read what I'm not saying. I don't think we need a scaling solution to replace lightning. I just think we need another scaling solution in addition.
Or on top of. L-ARK seems like kinda the best of both worlds if you’re worried about low-balance user onboarding.
👀
I love playing with my bitcoins.
(on regtest and testnet)
"Lightning fails in about 30% of the time." ?!?!? We run some of the biggest and most central nodes on Lightning and see extremely low failure rates. Are you sending Lightning payments with a potato? We obviously cannot see the failure rates for other services, but for Rizful and Alby, unless you are doing something very wrong, you should almost never have failures.
You mean ARK's custody profile is unacceptable even for small amounts?
No ark is good. It could be better with more op codes.
yes it is
source?
I have an agenda... Shit needs to work 100% of the time. It must NEVER fail.
When wallets fail, channels disappear, sats disappear, fees debit from the balance without any confirmation or in a hidden way and/or when people cannot complete a simple zap fast enough to see the result come back, they fully give up the idea of using Bitcoin.
Oh great.. all I wanted... More idiots selling shit we don't want.
Yes, I am an Alby customer for over 3 years and your customer too. Shit doesn't work. Your site is not even understandable to me, a CS graduate.
I just had to talk to Alby 2 days ago to manually change one of my peer nodes IP address because the peer channel owner decided to just move IPs and everything broke.
It's like you have to have a computer science degree to keep simple things tolking to one another.
The state of lightning is terrible.
Never had any of those problems ever. No need to shill on chain zaps which may work, but are also dangerous.
Normal business owners are reporting in public 25% failure rates in the real world using Square. Is Jack Dorsey and incompetent idiot doing something very wrong? I am not as smart as Jack Dorsey, nor am I a billionaire. I do not think I could implement a better LN point of sale terminal integration than Square has. I don’t know if anyone could do better.
Maybe everyone reporting these major LN problems are liars in a secret conspiracy against Lightning. But otherwise, bartenders, baristas, and people serving food seem to have widespread problems using *the most deployed LN vendor software in the world* made by a *billionaire developer who has funded Nostr and Lightning extensively*. If Lightning is so complicated that only some fringe service virtually nobody beyond hardcore Bitcoiners on Nostr can use, maybe the protocol itself is flawed when you operate it at scale.
Keen to find out more about why Lightning is failing for you 30% of the time (as are others).
I did that already. Dark Wisp.
Yes, but you don't need to promote it.
It’s just math.
I don’t think people should promote BCH, but nostr doesn’t care.
There will always be a client out there that does the simple math to display this value.
I'm in favor of this, introduce the normies with what they are familiar with, custody.
custodial LN are useful even if you have your node because you can take advantage using levels of privacy or expense management.
anyway I think the first step for anyone in bitcoin is learn about it, onchain self custody, because they supposedly haven’t enough or know nothing to starting expending in the payment network. if they want, custodial is there, 0-config channels from a LSP too as @ZEUS provides by Olympus, but its a high graduation in my opinion.
Then you have never used lightning
Heretic! Apostate! Burn the Witch!
Do you blame Alby or lightning itself (or both)?
Lightning isn't for normies. Cashu is centralized. I think both can evolve and upgrade, but we don't have a solution yet. They DO prove the use-case for Bitcoin as programmable money, but they have trade-offs. So far as reliability is concerned, Bitcoin takes the cake. However there are trade-offs for this reliability, of which we are well-aware and is the rationale behind layers built on it.
Architecture is not easy. There are no silver-bullets. Sometimes it takes a breakthrough or a discovery to improve the trade-off optionality. I think that is what we are waiting for.
Take this list of system architecture trade-offs as an illumination. It's not always a simple iron triangle:
- Scalability vs. performance
- Vertical vs. horizontal scaling
- Latency vs. throughput
- Stateful vs. stateless architecture
- SQL vs. NoSQL databases
- Batch vs. stream processing
- Synchronous vs. asynchronous processing
- Consistency vs. availability.
- Cost vs. quality
- Time-to-market vs. technical debt
- there are many others
I have. @Vitor Pamplona is right. Lightning is broken. Mostly LND is the culprit. People need to stop using that GO shit. The UX sucks. The UI sucks. It fails basic operations and nobody knows why. It has knobs that do nothing. When it breaks, mere mortals are completely helpless. It's a complete mess.
The question isn't whether you can make it work for you. The question is how do you make it work for the normie. If you think normies can run a lightning channel, you're delusional.
ultimately there is no meaningful difference between PayPal, cash app and venmo
and custodial lightning.
I burn tokens having deepseek V4 fix my self-custodial setup.
now it works more than 90% of the time and I have customer support.
it is usually network reasons that cause failures. not intrinsic problems with ln itself.
Really? The cognitive dissonance is something else here
oh no no no. I'm not saying that normied can use lightning. I'm saying normies can put on laser eyes and learn just like we all did. I guess I'm just the lucky 1% of people that started a mynode box and left it running for years and years to the point where I finally understood what the hell it was doing.
all I'm arguing is that lighting is not as broken as people make it out to be. it's hard, sure. but it's not impossibly hard to the point of being unusable. The growth of the network proves that.
trusted third parties can and will be pressured.
it's is axiomatic.
maybe there's a difference in the early days, but over time that difference disappears.
You must have lucked out by connecting to sane nodes and avoided becoming a routing node
The growth of the network proves that there is no real alternatives and it has the best trade-offs for what is needed.
I didn’t trust
I verified
I didn’t trust
I verified
oh snap I'm about to switch to a new ISP and have been planning what to do for DNS and my VoIP server, hadn't even thought about this
There is a huge difference.
Even custodial lightning allows you to participate in the Bitcoin economy. It allows you to interact with fully sovereign merchants for example. It gives you more options.
And optionality is a form of freedom.
PayPal cashapp and venmo are also "more options" that allow you to interact with more different merchants.
and if optionality is a form of freedom, by that yardstick they offer orders of magnitude more "freedom" than custodial lightning does.
and in what way is a merchant "sovereign" if they rely on a third-party custodial service?
It is amazing that this is what we are debating here…
These people have lightning derangement syndrome and do not live in the real world.
Also there is this weird obsession that everything needs to be decentralized and self custodial.
Centralization and convenience makes sense for a lot of the things we need to live. Decentralization only makes sense for a few things imo…issuance of money supply and free speech are the most important
Integrate Bitcoin Cash, Zano, or Dash into Amethyst. There's a growing BCH community, Zano might be even more perfect but unfortunately unknown
This is just not true at all in any regard. Custodial lightning is still miles ahead of anything else even if it has its flaws.
Try signing up for PayPal and someone pays u through with it. You would have to wait for at least 2 weeks before you can withdraw your money since it is a new account. Let's be honest with our comparisons pls
*ahem*
you didn't respond to my point
trusted third parties are ALWAYS put under pressure by the state.
there are no exceptions, this always happens.
so on the contrary, it's YOU that has a lightning derangement syndrome. some weird belief that " it will be different this time "
because Bitcoin 🙄
I'll confess that it's better because it's newer and hasn't been enshitified yet.
but all third party custodial platforms will eventually be put under pressure and become garbage.
it's the law.
And all a troll need do is send funds from known illicit wallets
Monero got there first. Everything else is a privacy shitcoin.
> centralization and convenience makes sense for a lot of things we need to live
Like what? Do you have an example of something in life where we directly benefit from centralization? And dont conflate centralization with convenience, we posit that you dont need centralization to make life easier. Can you give examples to the contrary?
You don't understand the difference between owning your crypto and someone else effectively owning it because they have the freaking keys? I think you understand this in general. Also there is loss of privacy when most go for custodial holding of their funds, especially as more and more KYC regulations are heaped on top of that. Sort of a big deal.
> Even custodial lightning allows you to participate in the Bitcoin economy. It allows you to interact with fully sovereign merchants for example. It gives you more options.
Only if the custodian allows it, that is, it is no different from a regular bank, which, if it decides to allow you, is the only time you will be able to use "your" "money".
I thought like that too. Turns out, our world is not fair, and majority forces solutions on minority. So no, such solution is not possible. The only way is to induce fear or just force enough of society, to not use centralized stuff. Then it's possible to achive something similar to freedom.
Would you rather people keep small amounts of bitcoin in a custodial wallet so they can learn bitcoin and transact in the bitcoin circular economy or just continue to keep their money in banks and never interact with bitcoin vendors?
You guys are correct that the bitcoin kept in custodial lightning wallets is not bitcoin that the users actually own but they can withdraw it to self custodial solutions or swap to onchain which makes it infinitely better than fiat
Again lightning derangement syndrome and this obsession to onboard everyone to cypherpunk solutions is completely delusional
yeah it's only been 9 years.
no doubt LN onboarding will increase self-custodial Bitcoin usage any day now
are you aware that you're repeating sound bites from 2019?
obviously there has NOT been a rush of new users who came in via custodial lightning
I wasn’t buying stuff from bitcoin vendors and could not work to convince square vendors to flip a button to accept bitcoin in 2019…
I can do these things now and expect the ability to use lightning in my day to day activities to increase as well. I use a custodial lightning wallet to do so and still self custody bitcoin for long term savings
Again lightning derangement syndrome
You can use monero and I will continue to call out the bullshit you guys spew
you can continue to pretend that custodial usage somehow results in sovereign usage.
that never actually happens at scale.
people just stay in custodial solutions, which are eventually pressured by authority.
but you can keep repeating "lightning derangement syndrome" if it makes you feel good I guess.
I am not pretending…I am telling you that custodial lightning has made it easier for me to transact with vendors that exchange their goods for bitcoin and for some reason you think this is a bad thing
I said it doesn't work at scale.
because 99% of people stay in their custodial solutions.
this is called " trusted third parties "
it's generally acknowledged to be a bad idea.
Not the best but certainly better than the fiat alternatives…
Perfect is the enemy of good for you guys
The merchant doesn't have to. I'm saying that customers can pay merchants and they can run their own node. With PayPal, both sides have to be in the walled garden. With lightning, both can be sovereign, but it's also good for sovereign merchants to get paid from client's custodial wallet. They couldn't care less where the payment comes from. They don't even know.
> Again lightning derangement syndrome
Wrong. I'm XMR enthusiast, I don't need LN.
Cool story bro 👍
Options are good *for people.* The problem with custodial lightning is not that people shouldn't have access to options. The problem is that people want the promise of decentralized lightning to work and it doesnt, so they post rationalize custodial lightning. Its sunk cost fallacy more than anything. The nefarious ever present "they", those that seek to take away our options, love to give us options that enable them to take things away later. Custodial lightning *will* devolve into fractional reserve banking entirely. If it can happen it will happen and incentives are outcomes always.
Then as its _failing_ then there would be a strong push for other solutions, including merge mining, right?
I'm generally in support of anything that will give competition to the shitshow that is LN, as well as deossify the parasitic trusted third parties that have entrenched themselves at the expense of Bitcoin. This includes both BIP300+301 blind merge mining/drivechains, and covenants. I also think taproot should be deprecated and there should be no fee discount regarding witness.
is merge mining and drivechains the same tech/proposal - HQ
no. Merge mining has existed for a long time in Bitcoin and other chains. Namecoin, for example, is merge mined. Drivechains require a miner-activated softfork for *blind* merge mining, which lets the side chain operate very independently, so you can have a chain that is denominated in Bitcoin but that uses completely different rules for state (one of Paul’s proposed side chain for his upcoming drivechaik-enabled Bitcoin fork eCash.com will use zk-Snarks to make a privacy coin).
1st merge-mined chain is namecoin http://6cbn4rskfdr647otej7gpqlmpqcmj723vg2eoeuu7ljbwu6cpdebozyd.onion:8080/ amethyst the nostr client currently has nip-05 namecoin lookups