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"look everyone is using custodial lightning so we should embrace that" makes me feel sick. I always thought this was a temporary measure until we had better wallets, TIL the plan now is to embrace it fully for mass onboarding. We're working with a few partners to try an alternative approach. If it fails then it fails, but at least I can sleep at night knowing we tried. Mass onboarding into custody seems like a disaster without a really good non-custodial offboarding plan.

Replies (27)

this is NEVER going to work with lightning. We can hope there will be other layer 2s that can do this, but that might be years till we reach this point. I know you already kniw this, but Here is why it doesn't work with lightning: If you want to receive a payment, you need to be part of the lightning network (eg. you need a channel). Also, the channel needs to have inbound liquidity. So how to get to that point? Easy right? Just pay someone to open a channel to you! BUT HOW, IF YOU'RE NOT PART OF THE NETWORK ALREADY??? Do you expect people, to go buy bitcoin on an exchange, send the bitcoin to their lnwallet, open a channel, rebalance their liquidity, only so that they can receive a zap? I know we love to play idealist, but it's never gonna happen for the normal pleb. The more realistic approach is to just start receiving zaps into custody. Once the pleb learns about self custody and has received enough zaps to open a channel, he can move them to self custody. Why are you trying to build the skyscraper from the clouds to the ground?
↩ replying to Derek Ross
I agree we should make easier abstraction for this. However, people are used to managing outbound liquidity, and linking their venmo or whatever to their bank and debit card, those are complicated things. Managing liquidity is inherent in all of that. The only difference w lightning is literally one step: manage inbound liquidity instead of just outgoing.
I completely agree. We're trying to build solutions to handle the incoming routing barrier with swaps. Utilizes our liquidity and WoS liquidity to ensure routes. I've been using this method for a few months now with 0 routing issues paying for things at @Mysterious Hamster merchants and others
Bitcoin Well
Stack on Lightning, store on-chain! A guide to setting up balanced self custody Lightning Channels for free
A guide to setting up balanced self custody Lightning Channels for free
↩ replying to jb55
You can: - download Alby Hub for macOS/windows , it uses ldk, and have it on your computer. - have it installed on an umbrel or start9, (or linux server with lnd), using the internal lnd node. - self-mount it on your own cloud using docker. - (get the Alby subscription and have it hosted on Alby Cloud) In all of these variants, each one can create isolated nwc subaccounts for friends and family, using Alby Go app. If you want a private onboarding or have a talk, hello@getalby.com