Oddbean new post about login | logout Over the past few months I’ve noticed a pretty big shift from an ideological perspective to a more practical one amongst influential developers around here. It wasn’t long ago that ZBD was catching bullets left and right for releasing a client with an email/password login that held users private keys for them. Now it’s seemingly encouraged as long as it’s nsecbunker run by one of your favorite client developers? “The node is on the phone” and fully self-custodial lightning for all was a loud narrative until people were actually forced to try it when WoS pulled out of US. Didn’t take long for it to become all about ecash and how to “minimize” custodial risks instead. I tend to be on the practical side of things so I welcome the shift, but I’d caution against losing sight of why we are here in the first place.
Nobody likes to admit that running self-custodial lightning is not even close to changing your own oil...it is more like extracting rubber from a tree, chopping down the tree for wood, and mining for graphite simply to make your own pencil. It is so bad that we are talking about going back to fucking ecash MINTS (an idea that was abandoned in the 90's for centralization risks) just to make it make sense. nostr:nevent1qqswuu7uv4d254tk70a2lzwkdv46gva4c5h3a698mufpvjd2vuhv69cpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyq7cg2h7e40zj0egke38jvmsfglm3ns4825367g2ky0k5afdgjjz6qcyqqqqqqgzfjgey
My stance on these have not changed... Zebedee is a walled garden, like most apps, that bolted on Nostr. The model of accounts will be the dominant kind initially if Nostr is widely adopted and app gardens will seek to control such accounts while allowing linking others Practically nobody uses nsecBunker as the friction is rather high. Node in the phone was great marketing, but would go on to hurt a lot of plebs with lost funds (directly or indirectly with forced channel closures) due to how the flow has to work to be non custodial. Paired with a custodial lightning address, its costly theatre. Fedimints and Cashu are no panacea. They mostly offer privacy with custodial lightning, but also open the avenue to bearer ecash that can be to some extent exchanged out of band (but so could lnurl withdraw qr codes) Now with that said... The good that comes from Zeus/Olympus is putting it through its paces to find what works and doesnt.