Dark (New) on Nostr: BTC Sessions’ tutorial on Alby hub with Start9 is helpful. And some other resources ...
BTC Sessions’ tutorial on Alby hub with Start9 is helpful. And some other resources he has on his channel about setting up a standalone lightning node from scratch and opening channels.
I think some of your concerns will be addressed by gaining an understanding first about how inbound and outbound liquidity work with lightning nodes. You will also learn some background knowledge that will show you how layer 2 technologies work while indeed still remaining Bitcoin.
Lightning is complicated. Lightning development is hard. Rolling out a consumer focused product and providing enough tool tips to fill in users’ knowledge gaps about how lightning even works is unrealistic.
Once you gain some of the background knowledge about Lightning, opening/closing/balancing channels, and recovering your funds in the event that you have a catastrophic issue with your node hardware, you may come to the conclusion that, for the minuscule sat balances most Lightning users are maintaining for sub $100 purchases, Alby’s cloud hosted option for under $10/month is actually a good value if you’re transacting in BTC day to day.
My experience with Lightning has pretty much left me with the impression that it’s best treated like the walk-around cash in your pocket. You have liquidity that will support buying what you need for a day’s outing, but if you lose your billfold or your node goes down, you aren’t going to go hungry. You can just reload an alternate wallet like Speed Wallet from one of your main stacks on chain and keep trucking until you can sort it out.
Being your own bank using a monetary instrument that isn’t constantly losing purchasing power is not easy. You instantly take on the role of bank manager, teller, head of security and head of IT. It’s why most people are quite happy to ignore the inflationary theft and counter party risk of having their life savings in banks and retirement investment accounts.
I think some of your concerns will be addressed by gaining an understanding first about how inbound and outbound liquidity work with lightning nodes. You will also learn some background knowledge that will show you how layer 2 technologies work while indeed still remaining Bitcoin.
Lightning is complicated. Lightning development is hard. Rolling out a consumer focused product and providing enough tool tips to fill in users’ knowledge gaps about how lightning even works is unrealistic.
Once you gain some of the background knowledge about Lightning, opening/closing/balancing channels, and recovering your funds in the event that you have a catastrophic issue with your node hardware, you may come to the conclusion that, for the minuscule sat balances most Lightning users are maintaining for sub $100 purchases, Alby’s cloud hosted option for under $10/month is actually a good value if you’re transacting in BTC day to day.
My experience with Lightning has pretty much left me with the impression that it’s best treated like the walk-around cash in your pocket. You have liquidity that will support buying what you need for a day’s outing, but if you lose your billfold or your node goes down, you aren’t going to go hungry. You can just reload an alternate wallet like Speed Wallet from one of your main stacks on chain and keep trucking until you can sort it out.
Being your own bank using a monetary instrument that isn’t constantly losing purchasing power is not easy. You instantly take on the role of bank manager, teller, head of security and head of IT. It’s why most people are quite happy to ignore the inflationary theft and counter party risk of having their life savings in banks and retirement investment accounts.