Oddbean

Yes Indeedy - lets outline the cases where you start as a lightning n00b and need a nice path to becoming fully self sovereign: Starting point - Custodial Wallet - once you are ready to wean yourself off of this you can go to step #1 below: Self Sovereign Step #1 - Wallet in the Cloud - AlbyHub - it is free. I've been using it for a while in beta. Its not perfectly sovereign but its a good stepping stone to go from custodial to learning channel management to running your own self sovereign node. It is by far the least steep learning hill to transition away from custodial. Self Sovereign Step #2 - more 3L33T if you want to run a super light lightning node, set it and forget with some tech skills required - there is this option here with LNBits + phoenixd but you'll still have to put up your own capital in bitcoin and spend about $5/mo on VPS, you need 24/7 uptime, this isn't gonna work with unstable internet. https://github.com/bitkarrot/lnbits-phoenixd/ Another option is to use Voltage but the price can be a bit steeper for serious usage as it jumps quickly from free to $25/month tier. the plus is you don't have to manage all the upgrades but you still need to have tech knowledge to run it Self Sovereign Step #3 - Super 3L33T Run your full self sovereign lightning node, e.g. CLN, LND, Eclair on your own hardware, using your own self sovereign internet satlink or whatever plus your own bitcoin capital and self manage it. This is a tall order for most 99% of plebs unless you're a tech junky, and even as a dev its time consuming and steep hill learn, less so to run after you have learned. pricing and setup may vary.

Alby is at least trying. When I interviewed Kwinten in Fall 2023 and he told me about the AlbyHub plan, I felt it was a great idea, at least one company is not running away or bending the knee to KYC. No other company is trying something, they're just giving up. Now That's just defeatist.

Never heard of your project until now. A brief look seems awesome. We need more solutions like yours and Alby so we aren't shoehorned into just one solution. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Yeah, they seen to just be on a downward trend for a while, I like the Alby team, but this seems like a bad decision for them as a company and Nostr, why not just increase fees on transactions if they aren't making enough.

It’s a business though right? I mean how else are they going to provide all those channels, unless you get an ad every time you’re zapped… If it’s done as a reasonable percentage I’m cool with that, if it’s a flat fee that would put me off. How do they currently pay people?

i don't consider it overly expensive. i don't consider it overly hard. i would never expect anyone in my extended family or anyone i know IRL to ever do this though. we gotta think of the other 99% of the world when it comes to freedom technology. i realize that freedom isn't free or easy, but that doesn't mean that we can't build to target more of the people that need it the most either.

I've sent payments and it takes like 100s of sats. I don't think there's any way that those are network fees or that they wouldn't be charging fees, they are to big to have been running for free for that long and so many users even with grants.

Routing fees can definitely be that much. It’s only 0 when they have a direct channel. I checked Blink because I assumed they have a direct channel with Blink. Companies can raise millions of dollars and they don’t have to tell everyone about it.

Oh man. We could have asked for a larger booth donation nostr:nprofile1qqstsw3gkljwt5stm9svt7htvcjlj4ffze4chkcyt4pxxj30xkgeg5qpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt4w35ku7thv9kxcet59e3k7mgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdux3wqdz 🤣🤣🤣