Please listen to Livera’s podcast with NVK. It’s not possible for everyone in the world to have their own UTXO and use it for everyday transactions. It never was possible. This “dream” — that people have that everyone can be self sovereign — is sold by folks who are idealistic but haven’t done the math. I would love it too if everyone could be self sovereign. It’s just that I understand the limitations and I’m not willing to chase an impossible dream and compromise the decentralization of the protocol. If you disagree, do the math. Show me how everyone in the world can have their own UTXO and make everyday transactions on L1 with self sovereignty. Our objective is to replace central banks. Unfortunately most people in the world will be using bitcoin ecash. It’s not true self sovereignty with their own UTXO but 1000x better than the current system where central bankers control our money and print it at will. View quoted note →

Absolutely agree. Once governments are starved of fiat and forced to go on a Bitcoin standard, their reign of tyranny will greatly diminish. The need for true self sovereignty will diminish when the power to enslave your own citizens is taken away.

You are collating two things 1. Everyone can own their own UTXO 2. Use it for everyday transactions 1 is important, 2 is not. Most people should use e-cash for everyday use. A UTXO would be used in a similar fashion to moving money into a high interest term deposit - where you hold the majority of your money but only make a transaction once a month to once every few years, depending how wealthy you are. A lightning channel to the eCash would allow the balance that's held by the custodian to be minimal. If a transaction fee exceeds the $10 -100 range even this breaks down.

Agreed with the L1 considerations. As you say, anyone who have done the calculations know that a decentralized money cannot provide L1 transactions for 8 billion people. Magical thinking have zero impact on reality. Any scaling solution that aims at giving 8 billion people access to Bitcoin must involve a free market of L2-L3 options. The Bitcoin base layer is the proper foundation for healthy free market competition, which in turn brings high degrees of security via game theory. I would say that there are degrees of self custody. Moving sats away from exchanges, who are government controlled, is a primary aspect of self custody. For significant amounts, custody involving L1 is ideal. For smaller amounts, an archipelago of options competing via game theory is far better than anything we have had before. Unserious and captured options will lose trust and users in benefit of the serious and non-captured options. LN operators are decentralized and sovereign banks, unimpacted by borders since Bitcoin is global and without borders.