All my zaps are self-custodial and I’ve done thousands of transactions using the blockspace of dozens. Lightning is a step-function improvement for Bitcoin payments. It’s not a silver bullet for sovereign scaling, but there never will be one. 

 Me two. I've never touched a custodial wallet.

I managed to set up everything: zaps, NWC, lnaddress, etc, etc.
Do I expect everyone else to follow my footsteps? Nope. 

 Even I'm too lazy to do all of this to collect a few dollars, and I know exactly how to do it, rather just risk getting rugged 

 I don’t see a problem with that if that’s how you economize. We will never “ban” banks or banking services, they have demand for a reason. Optionality and honest, open, legitimate money services is the end goal. 

 Thankfully I did it just before becoming a father. No way I would find the time now 🤣 

 At a minimum, I can Uncle Jim channels or liquidity for 100+ close friends and family members. And hybrid LSP solutions like @ZEUS make that whole process, which used to require days + lots of experience in tech to now require minutes and just a basic understanding of lightning.

Again, lightning doesn’t scale to 8B people under its current structure, and there aren’t 8B people who can figure it out anyway. But directionally it’s moving towards being much much easier to manage for the average person.

The real challenge we face today isn’t the technology, the tools, or the implementation of them. It’s getting 100 million people to actually have demand to use them. Once we get there, then we can talk about further scaling challenges. 

 I'm not shitting on LN because I want to shill something else. I'm sad because there's really no goodalternative.
I just think it's important to be realistic in public and tell the rest of people how it really is. Painting this rosier picture the LN is perfect and gona change the world just makes bitcoiners sound like shitcoiners.
 

 Want to say on this. You lightning node is only as secure and reliable as the hardware you put in it. Why it's misleading when people say to get a rpi or some other pre-built that is actually more dangerous to run reliability wise vs a proper server solution. Lightning network isn't as easy and safe as people make it out to be. Just a stop gap . 

 So what’s the solution? Or it doesn ‘t exist yet 

 Doesn't exist yet. I'm not pretending to having it all figured out. 

 Save in Bitcoin, spend Monero. 

 I think it will/is usefull in different ways that we all hoped for. Everyone hoped as a magic bullet for instant free txs, instead I think it is great for interop between L2s (Liquid, Fedi, Cashu, Ark)  seamlessly and instantly, good merchants that run their own LN node and it will be the rails for most Fiat txs, apps like Strike, CashApp etc. LN will be the protocol that connects everything. Most users will use other L2s like Fedi or Ark.  

 I find it confusing just working out what's custodial and not in the lighting world..! Anyway in my understanding, sending is pretty easy non custodial its receiving that's a pain, so for example here on nostr I have a custodial address to receive zaps but I'd never actually use that wallet to send.