while the control you have of "your" Bitcoin is an improvement over a custody agreement with a bank, there are thresholds of BTC below which the coins cannot be meaningfully spent. and Lightning still does not solve this, as there are financial middlemen there, too.

But that’s true also of a bank account, too. And at least with the lightning middlemen there’s no debanking risk. Win-win, I think.

an open channel comes with similar risks of "debanking." it's not like the passive safety assurance you have when holding the keys to Bitcoin UTXOs.

I’m intrigued by this statement. Care to explain?

there is a limit on how many people can maintain lightning channels at the same time. whenever the L1 is saturated, anyone else who wants to interact with lightning has to go through a custodian. it is nice when L1 fees are low but that is not currently the intended default state. L1 needs fees for its security budget. they are supposed to be high all the time according to core developers. when that happens, many users are priced out of owning their own channels and they end up in things like cashu mints or wallet of satoshi, where they can be rugged or debanked. the only way to make sure that more people are protected is by making self-custody more accessible, and for that to happen bitcoin needs more innovation. that's not happening right now, it's only scaling via custodians.

@goatmeal already summed up a lot of the concern but i wanted to point out some more details. hopefully we understand the Bitcoin keys part: you have control, no one can spend the coins without those keys. LN is made up of payment channels, which are an abstraction built on top of a time-locked UTXO. the decisions about that bitcoin are now shared, with methods for both parties to leave the channel and reclaim control over their portion of the "shared" bitcoin. this immediately opens the door for fraud. a bad channel partner is in many ways incentivized to steal your bitcoin. okay, so choose a good channel partner. but what is your goal with using the LN? if you want to pay someone/some entity that you know and can see face to face, a Lightning channel is overkill, with a lot of pointless complexity. just settle your tab, tell your friend "i owe you one," etc. but if you want to be able to send Lightning sats to strangers, you need to be well connected in the network. currently that means opening channels with large Lightning nodes. these nodes are essentially banks, but because we want to avoid the idea that we're recreating problematic finance, let's euphemistically call them "Lightning Service Providers." so these LSPs collect fees for the service they provide, like a bank. and you can say, "well they're a Bitcoin business so they want Bitcoin and Bitcoiners to succeed, but they have bills to pay, so this seems fine." they do indeed have profit motive, but that means that open channels need to be worth it. open channels cost money to monitor and manage. is it worth it for them to have a bunch of tiny channels with Bitcoin minnows looking to avoid on-chain fees? not really, a small channel doesn't do much to support routing payments and they won't collect many fees. so it's good business sense to avoid having certain users as channel partners. a centralized entity can say "no, you don't get to use LN," or if they were your channel partner, "you don't get to use LN anymore." "but there are other LSPs." with similar incentives. and those that seem more willing to open channels with anyone, or charge less in fees, could very well be looking to steal your bitcoin at the earliest opportunity. even a well-established LSP from one of the "good" Lightning companies could decide to snatch and grab a bunch of bitcoin and exit to L1, and you'd have to be monitoring your channels like a hawk to avoid the loss. (this is another problem) as BTC price increases, it becomes harder to use L1, and there is a stronger incentive for Lightning channel partners to steal your bitcoin. LN replaces the trustless machinery of mining to enforce the ledger with implicit trust of channel partners, many of which are indistinguishable from banks.

Thanks for the explanation - very useful and succinct. Could the counterparty risk be mitigated through the use of watchtowers? One lesson I’m taking from this is - don’t put more sats into your lightning channel than you are willing to lose. Makes sense really - in the same way that I don’t carry $x,000s of dollars in cash in my wallet (my dad always did this- I have no idea why). Or how I keep a low balance in the bank account tied to my debit card…

> succinct you're too kind. i fucking rambled. watchtowers and other monitoring methods are a necessity, but they cost time and money. not everyone will have the privilege of options when using money. if Bitcoin is to succeed, it needs to be useable. if you have a small stack, would you risk it all moving to LN just so you could use a larger percentage of the sats?