Oddbean new post about login | logout While I'm ignorantly ranting: Lightning is trash, too. Stupid, idiotic concept. Pre-paid bar tabs? GTFO. I'm so friggin done with all this today.
The bar tab meme was wrong from the start. Bar tab implies each channel is only good for one payment destination. It’s also not really pre-paid at all. Me opening a 10M sat channel costs me a chain fee and nothing more.
The confusion is a big part of the problem with lightning. The rest is if anyone attempts to self - host, they pretty much get rugged a ton and nothing works as expected.
My comment was a sacrasm. The real problem is that operating a lighting nose is no easy task. Pretending it is an easy task, by clicking "install node" in start9/umbrel/whatever lead to problems. You need to understand a lot of things otherwise you will loose sats. But hey, education is not free.
Yup. All of this just basically cost me the entirety of my savings if I can't transact. Not friggin useful at all.
On the other hand you have to do really silly things to loose everything. Self custody is hard, scary and intimidating. What if you have 10btc ot 100. How are you not scared about doing a mistake. There are plenty of threats to your keys. From government and other thugs to hacks, exploits and boat accidents. You will never have all of your coins in a hot wallet (lightning). If you're not willing to take that risk, that's ok. Use custody wallets with change money.
I'm never going to be a whole-coiner. I'm very late to this. But this level of complexity is just not cool. At least not for an idiot like me.
I agree. And it's never been an easy task to secure your money. That's the reason why banks are on the market. Just saying.
Also we are still early. The tech and UC improves with every day. Have some hope.
*UX
bitcoin is for saving lightning is for spending ecash maybe it is good for spending and tipping there has been some strange spikes in bitcoin fee rates lately that have impacted my own movements that i'd have less struggle with were i in a time preference state but at the same time, i think it's probably helped me spy out some high level things i can do that have a broad effect down in the pit of the real viewpoints can change quickly just with even one little new data point available when it seems dark where you are at the moment, sometimes that's just because you are under a particularly unusual combination of elements around you... like shadow over top, colour around you dark, and many confusing mirrors in this dark space that you see more things in than you would if the shadow above was less and the brightness of the light was greater and the things around you had better radiosity instead of reflectivity my advice is go for a walk and let God goad you
That's good advice that I will not be taking. Thank you, though.
Never say never to becoming a whole coiner.
I do. There's only one very small possibility for that happening and it's so far-fetched that is nigh on zero probability.
Btw. do you see how hard it is for someone inexperienced or incapable of to do things other see "easy to self custody"? Growing food, shoot, eat right, health ...
I can only do one of those moderately well.
I'm a classic antient men. I do everything. Usually wrong 😂
Did your node crash with funds on it? I agree Lightning is not easy to use. Most ppl don’t have the time to learn how to manage the channels. It was advertised in the early days as free and instant txns but now we know that’s not really how it works. It can be free, but not always.
No. I don't and won't mess with my own lightning node. I just can't stand how convoluted all this is.
Yeah. None of it is user friendly at this stage. Just have to remember, 100+ years ago ppl were plugging their washing machines into light sockets bc that’s the only place the electricity was. Tools will get better with time.
My lightning node is self hosted, it works fine. But im NOT going to tell you to go run it, that it’s ezpz. Its not. I raw dog a lot of shit. No umbrels here. I took the time to learn and figure stuff out. Just because most people aren’t qualified to run a LN node and it probably won’t ever be fool proof, doesn’t mean the technology is a dead end. Generally I have zero tolerance for the bar tab analogy and I know anyone who uses it doesn’t know what they are talking about. I say that in the nicest way possible.
the bar tab analogy just relates to the temporary nature and the mutual incentives to keep the record straight, otherwise, a whole different thing both sides use the same tech, it is based on building game move maps that incentivise honesty, and punish dishonesty of course, dodgy barman could demand an inflated price for the return of your credit card but that's one of the elements of the protocol the model doesn't address
force close. checkmate 🤪 Yes, it's stupid as fuck.
Yeah force closes exist. What about it. Has nothing to with lightning being a bar tab. It’s not a bar tab. You should account for closing costs when opening. Worst case closing costs.
I was being sarcastic. And I find the analogy stupid.
No... Lightning is trash from a general user perspective of you want to be sovereign.
Even without trying to DIY, it sucks.
Idk man Alby and WoS are pretty 🔥. Lightning is great with a custodian That's the problem.
🫂🫂
Double 🫂🫂🫂🫂
Eh, It’s more like a prepaid debit card that you can receive on as well. Use it anywhere, only limit is how much was put on the card in the first place (sort of). It’s getting more stable as time passes.
Zapping here for me is like playing the monopoly game. It is just for fun sort of. For me to use it as a payment method, it is not practical. If I get paid with sats, I need to convert to BTC and fiat to use it (in today's world). I pay fees for that. Plus to convert, I have to have a minimum amount etc.
it's not money, it's a semi-private database of title transfer you don't go to the court registry to change property ownership of stuff in your hands when you get in return for passing it to someone, something that you want, such as a claim to other property if you had to register every change of ownership on this registry it would be extremely bulky and complex bitcoin is like a small set of correspondent banks in a banking network it's still a lot cheaper than trying to run a clearinghouse based on the speed of moving gold bars, and because of the cryptography, gains the benefit of being hard to corner just go search for "Hunt Brothers Silver" to learn about an example of why bitcoin is hard to corner
you just have dust, then, i guess if it costs more than it's worth to move it, just abandon it dust means anything much under like $5 or so on chain this is why i recommend spending the extra to get a 1-2tb disk to store a full bitcoin chain on and then you have a lot more options for this kind of situation bitcoin core now has really nice coin control features which let you select where you are going to spend from in your UTXO set i use this often to make my transactions simpler, so if i have 524ksat in one UTXO, and i want to spend 500ksat, it might make sense to actually add a secondary output instead of change operation to add that to another, larger, old UTXO, since moving it twice is going to be more expensive
i hate VMs too, this caused me a big hassle this last week spent a whole week trying to do windows-gnu so i could dev purely on windows and not have a hybrid setup nope, back to the hybrid setup... synergy KVM and i do my gaming and browsing and media on my high powered thing and do my dev work and testing on the shitty cheap thing yeah, it makes no sense, i know, that's why i fought it so long i lost. when i scratch some future work together or whatever, i'll revamp my setup but for now this is literally the only way these puzzle pieces sit together