Mostly because of Wallet of Satoshi going away. Preach self custody but everyone was on WoS's tit

Self-custody is not practical. You go to a lot of effort to either constantly keep your channels well-maintained, and even then, you still are at risk of going down an hours-long rabbit hole to recover funds. I wouldn't put more than $500 of bitcoin in lightning, and even then, I consider that money GONE. I'm elated to find that it is still there.

Agreed

And I know that it isn't really "gone". I just would abandon a max $500 than have to sperg out on finding the right arcane spell to recover it from a fucked-up channel.

I don’t think it’s because lightning is bad, more because: - Apple stopped Zaps on Damus - WoS is gone from the US without another good custodial option - BTC price is up and people aren’t as generous as before

Yeah, when alby had the problem and my wallet was displayed as empty, I was like, Welp, no surprise there... Was happy to be wrong, but it feels like it was just a delay.

Smart ones only had in WoS what they would carry in cash around for the day; like me. Gun to face “hand me your walllet!” Me: here you go stick up man. Good luck. It’s about $60usd.

I look at cryptocurrency with a few heuristic questiond. One of them is "how susceptible is your solution to getting stomped by a centralized authority, like a government or app store owner?" If the answer is "very", it is not a good solution. Lightning is bad, because even the best solution is not good.

Yes. I only ever had about $3 in it. I drained/transferred to Strike wallet when Nostr raised the alarm about them potentially rugging customers in the US.

And I mean, yeah, I'm gonna sperg out on running my own bitcoin node and learning multisig and all that bc IT IS MY RETIREMENT. I am not gonna put that much effort to keep $500 live and spendable on a network that doesn't even have a guarantee that a channel will exist when i need it or of successfully routing any given payment. I don't even know if that is acceptable enterprise infrastructure.

I’m still using in the US & it works great for zaps. Until it doesn’t. Nothing else really worked for me with zaps. I tried Strike a while ago. No luck.

When it comes to getting people to use a solution, difficult is basically equivalent to impossible, which is equivalent to a failed solution.

Absolutely agree.

The easy solution take time and a price that people is not in disposition to pay even if they have the resources

Still WoSing in Canada If I get rugged I get rugged. Will be less than what Celsius took from me so meh

I'm not sure why everyone thinks they need to "maintain channels" If you don't want to be bothered with it, don't route payments. Use your shit for only yourself.

Same here. Rug away. In the meantime I zap so it will be a fun cost. You may eventually be “whole” with Celsius. I saw some interesting news on that. They are protecting the BTC & I think the plan is to make customers “whole” in local currency. Sure, you lose the BTC if that’s what you had in there. Cash back is Better than losing it all. Am I off on this?

Correct I do the same

It has been 6 years.

🤔🧐

Lightning is not bad. It's, frankly, amazing technology. It's just ill-suited to small scale nodes. It was fine when fees were low b/c the problems were hidden. But now fees are permanently high so the devs that were pushing the state of the art of lightning self-custody are coming to terms with this reality. The most private solution for fast settlement is looking like large LN nodes that offer privacy preserving custodial IOUs. When your stack of IOUs gets big enough, withdraw to cold storage. This is the 99% solution. It's WoS with good privacy. You might get rugged for your tipping wallet. Big deal; it's better than maintaining a lightning node and dealing with liquidity, force closes, mempool fee storms, server uptime, etc. We need to soft fork again to bring on the next cohort of self-custodial bitcoin users. This is the real battle. It's playing out on github, the mailing list, delving, and other bitcoin developer forums, and even on twitter. But, as usual, the quality of discourse on twitter is low. WYGD? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Only About 5% of my stack at the time (thanks to cory @ swan), but all my shit coins. Liquidate them it would do me a favour

Oh, those are liquidated for sure. Gonzo. Point in time value may be returned to you via the protected BTC. You deserve the pain but you may get some redemption.

Its gone. If i get any back cool but the cheapest lesson i have learned.

I dodged Blockfi and Voyager. I learned a huuuge lesson without the full pain. Watching others touch the stove & scream means the stove is fuckin hot. So I don’t touch.

I moved from blockfi to Celsius lol i was chasing yield

Most of us were. Same here. Odell & others saved my ass. Paul Revere screaming to get off exchanges just hit me as a must do immediately one day. And I did. Luckily. If I waited 2-3 more months, disaster.

Yeah. FSR Strike never could connect to zap from, so I was forced to WoS. I just got a TestFlight update for WoS yesterday, so I did it. But I wouldn’t ever hold any appreciable Sats in it. Blue Wallet is my zap vehicle and never much of a balance. As you say, fun cost.