False. There are thousands of people and businesses using it non-custodially for real economic activity because Lightning is the fastest and cheapest way to settle payments online. Always has been, likely will be for a long time. 

 💯 

 Good straw manning Sir. All your pep talk, dismissive troll-calling and attacking good willed people from outside the IT world who are giving real feedback from lived experience won't change what us, the non-devs are struggling with. You are among a small group of people who understand all this naturally and think that Zeus wallet UI is for normal people. You lost sight of the streets. Your arrogant attitude is what drives custodial adoption. Check your privilege mate or you soon can enjoy your little Lightning bubble by yourself. In case you want that, be the big fish in a tiny pond, you're doing great. 

 Hosted node solutions like Alby Hub are very good alternatives if you don’t want to maintain hardware. It’s not free, but it’s very fast and it just works. 

 self hosting LN may never reach mass adoption. not because it sucks, it is growing elegantly actually. 
because people are lazy and the habit of offloading the burden of self custody to others has been carved into humans gene 

 Correct. 

 But, you just described a public routing node which is not, I repeat, NOT for regular users.  First off, and this is really important, it's PUBLIC. When has anything designed for public use, ever been suitable for private use? 

A public routing node provides routing services for the lightning network for fun and profit. It has to ADVERTISE itself to the world to attract other nodes to connect to, and use it's services.  

A public routing node requires a good working knowledge of Linux CLI and the knowledge and ability to secure an Internet facing server.  It's advertising itself to the world. It's going to be attacked. Add to that a static IP, decent bandwidth, and a fairly grunty machine if it gets busy.  

And, liquidity. If you haven't got a decent chunk of Bitcoin to provide a significant number of channels with enough liquidity to be useful to the network, you're waisting your time, money, electricity, hardware and effort. 

This is not the setup a regular person needs for a lightning wallet. 

End uses use a private, non-routing non-custodial wallet that doesn't need to be online 24/7, doesn't need channels balanced, because it doesn't route other people's payments. It uses  unannounced private channels so neither the wallet, the node, or the channels will show on any lightning network maps, or be traceable in any way. There's litterly no way to ever know if a private wallet exists. 

A private non-routing non-custodial lightning wallet, is private. No channels it uses can be seen by anyone. No payments made, or received can be traced by anyone.  

This setup can run on a cheap mobile phone.  And there's plenty of options for private, non-routing, non-custodial lightning wallets for mobile phones.

Phoenix wallet has to be the easiest non-custodial, non-routing wallet to use.  I have used Phoenix, now I use Zeus on mobile.   

 1. I'm describing end user nodes. Every node has to manage liquidity and routes some way or another otherwise you can't send or receive. It's not a routing node exclusive concern.

2. Unnanounced channels are NOT private. They are easily found by probing and looking on-chain. Don't operate under that assumption nor perpetuate that misnomer myth.

If you want a real world example of a end user self custodial pain:
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 > 1. I'm describing end user nodes. Every node has to manage liquidity and routes

No it doesn't. Fuck off with your bullshit. At least go an RTFM before making such stupid statements.

Or, you're not ignorant and you're intentionally lying to push a shitcoin.

Let me guess, if I do a quick look into your history, is there a lot of shitcoin promoting there?  

Soooo...what's the bet?  Is he an ignorant fool or shitcoin scammer? 

 

 You should reflect on the way you choose to act and argue online. It's really unhealthy. 

 Ah, ok. I've won that argument now that you've started with the personal insults.

Why don't you take your own advice and stick to the topic rather than degrading yourself like that. 

You have a lightening node that you've opened public announced channels, but you think you have a private node.  The evidence is you complaining about having to balance channels which you don't have to do with private channels. 

So, you don't have any idea about how to setup LND as a private lightning wallet, instead, you setup a poorly optimised, low liquidity, badly connected public routing node because you didn't do any research. And now you just complain about nothing working properly.

Your own ignorance is your problem.





 

 I don't have public channels. I never said there was a need to rebalancing it. Why are you pulling things out of your ass? 

 They are fine pieces of software that make it as easy as possible to use Lightning in a self-custodial way. That was never in question.

The UX issues exist at the protocol level, they are stuff that apps can't easily solve.

Things like: the need to run a service 24-7, liquidity management, incoming liquidity, routing and failed payments. Not to mention the overreliance on lnurl which has a whole different set of requirements 

 While I agree those are all issues, there is no technology without tradeoffs. I personally don't think that those make lightning unusable or even especially difficult, and they are problems which exist with lots of internet technologies.

It will continue to get better and different layers with different tradeoffs will start to be more popular. 5 years ago, there barely was a lightning network. Now, it likely accounts for the majority of Bitcoin transactions (not by volume obviously but by quantity). 

For better or worse, probably over half the world is waiting until their bank offers a Bitcoin checking account before they decide to try using it. And that isn't because of a small blocksize or high fees, blocks are basically empty right now. So let's not break a good thing. 

 I agree with most of what you said. I like LN, that's why I dedicate time and money on it.
But I'm not pretending it has good UX. 

 Fair enough. I agree with that too, and I look forward to seeing cool new ways to make it easier to manage. Ideas like Ark or CTV seem interesting but there clearly isn't demand yet for new solutions for scaling to be brought to production. 

 And you still are bitching about it?. 

 Hahahaha yes! Fucking connect Zeus to it and you literally have the best UX and fully sovereign. I don't believe he's running a node. 

 Private node?  

You opened multiple channels in unannounced mode?  Why are you balancing them then?  They're private, they don't route. Private channels work better when they're not balanced. Surly you've read the manual and know that?

Only public channels need to be balanced. They work better when they are balanced because it provides paid routing opportunities to route other people's payments.  

Private channels never route payments so being balanced doesn't do anything for you apart from waisting fees balancing the channels. There's no point balancing private channels.

RTFM 

 I never claimed that I rebalanced or needed to rebalance channels. Maybe instead of constantly crying RTFM you can actually read what I wrote and address the central point. 

 Quick poll: who here believes this is the final goal? No judgement, be real
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 Holding money on a phone/watch should simply have two variants:
-Fully featured easy UX with node/lightning/mint in background (with thought-out failsafes)
-limited good ux but tiny data footprint
 

 I wouldn't say it is the goal. Complete freedom and self custody is always the goal. But I do think that this is a realistic outcome, and I don't believe it would be due to technical challenges. Most people don't want that level of responsibility that comes with that freedom. 

If one day it becomes clear that 250M+ are trying to use base layer Bitcoin, my perspective may change. 

 It makes it easy for people to use, but it provides a bad UX when fees are high.