The fees make Bitcoin inaccessible to vast numbers of people, arguably the ones who need it most. Even at $6 a transaction, that’s a days wage in some parts of the world. Lightning could work, but then the argument of self-hosted freedom is out of the window, because even less people are running or can even afford to open their own channels.
Almost no one runs a node. I would guess that the 19,000 or so accessible nodes are run by less than 10,000 people. It’s a tiny minority, and this won’t change because people don’t care as much about this side of things as they do about getting rich. The numbers speak for themselves.
The issue is see approaching is that proxies for interaction introduce the same barriers that the system set out to escape. People can censor, deplatform and charge whatever fees they want via the proxies.
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All I’m saying is that it’s currently a social problem, not a technical one. Even if $2.37 (current low priority fee) is a days wages somewhere, if you value self custodial Bitcoin then you will pay to have it. When fees are in the hundreds and 100 million people are trying to use base layer Bitcoin, then my perspective would change.
The hard reality is that most people don’t have either the technical skills + confidence in technology or the desire to be completely free. No matter where you are in the world, the majority of people are more comfortable holding some type of central bank note or digital bank account than they are holding private keys.
If you preemptively try to force Bitcoin to be useable for 8B people in a completely sovereign way, you would destroy it faster than people would adopt it. A lot of these arguments center around block size - if we went to 8MB right now for instance, you wouldn’t “scale freedom money”, you would have empty blocks or even worse, blocks full of inscriptions and spam.
I understand the cypherpunk dream and I’d love for it to stay accessible for everybody, but for many, it’s as simple as trust based economic prosperity being better than trust based economic poverty.
People demanding sound money with a fixed cap and people demanding sovereign money nobody can control are two different groups, and the first one will likely always be larger.
If you can't afford on-chain, you can use custodial lightning, preferably ecash, until you improve your economic position and the security of self custody is worthwhile your increased savings.
Eventually on-chain wouldn't even have capacity to on-board people to lightning, but I'd fancy some upgrades to lightning's protocol allowing channels to be opened natively on lightning or to Bitcoin itself, like covenants.
If you don't have savings to lose, Wallet of Satoshi works just fine.
Lightning is fine for small transactions, I wouldn't keep any sizeable amounts on there though. The risk of having issues or losing your money is significantly higher than onchain, which is why I am skeptical of recommending this as an alternative.
