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178 sats \ 7 replies \ @ek 8h \ on: What 30k Free Users Taught Me About Charging $10/Month | Hacker News tech
How can you charge for FOSS that you are meant to run yourself (bitcoin wallets), so you also can’t provide it as a service since then it becomes custodial?
Edit: Or mhh, you can pay for Alby Hub as SaaS or a lightning node on Voltage, but I still don’t understand how these lightning nodes can be considered self-custodial. How do I know they don’t have access to it? Isn’t it literally running on their servers?
Zeus also is charging somewhat, even that we could consider it more as a V4V contribution:
- LSP leasing / renew fees for channels
- LSP fees
- wrapped invoices fees
- routing fees
- subscription for extra services fees
- merchandising
- newly automated split payments with a % you wish to donate directly for each payment. I think this model is not bad and users can sustain directly the maintaining of the app with their own fair price.
sorry for the shity image, I had to make it from another stupid phone
If the services offered are done well it could sustain the cost of maintaining the app.
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I think LIghtning wallets may have a solution to this problem via all kinds of things. It's definitely more clear how a LIghtning wallet will make money as compared to an onchain wallet.
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Yeah I pay for Alby hub
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Yea someone else's computer is inherently trustodial.
I know Voltage put in a lot of work to have custodial deniability in the form of a professional SaaS offering, having LND keys made client-side, encrypted at rest etc... but none of that can solve for the fact that you're unencrypted wallet is running in their memory.
A VPS or Dedi with a reputable host is still the best option in many cases for Lightning, a company like Akamai hosts far more valuable workloads for enterprises... tens and maybe hundreds billions of dollars in value in aggregate... trillions if you consider losses from operational downtime for the major infrastructure they're a cog in (think Bulk Electric Systems).
Their reputation is worth far more than the sum of all Lightning nodes on their infrastructure.
Same can be said though of most hardware one might use to self-host, pretty much everything has a backdoor "management engine" so in both cases you're just reliant on those vendors/the NSA from opening Pandora's box.
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easier maybe to hide in the masses though. using Bitcoin specific services and products makes you more of a target in my mind. and is more likely to have backdoors cracked open.
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I am no FOSS expert, but I think a project could sell the binaries as downloads on their website and still make the source code available via a github or something. You don't have to produce binaries for people to be FOSS (I don't think).
I wouldn't mind seeing a world where wallet projects charge by release, say something like 5000 sats to download the latest version's binaries. If you want to compile from source, you can do that, but if you want it nice and easy pay for the release.
You don't necessarily have to upgrade if you're running a prior release (although the problem becomes vulnerabilities...) and maybe the project makes old binaries available for free. I haven't thought this model through well enough, but the idea would be that it almost becomes like a subscription, except the users are paying per each new release and maybe there is a little signal when users buy a new release because they want access to new features that the devs are working on.
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