this seems like a reasonable view, but it seems like a "Bitcoin isn't going to be used by a large number of people anyway" view. and as long as a large number of people aren't using Bitcoin anyway, those people can run their own nodes what exactly do you think the positive trade-offs are, of using something like Spark as opposed to trusting a L1 node I mean? I'd suggest that people are using lightning because zero conf transactions were taken out behind the woodshed and shot.

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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.