I am an OG bitcoiner. When bitcoin became unusable as money, and the core devs started talking about using credit cards instead of actually using bitcoin, I thought BCH might be the way forward.

Now, BCH devs have made a lot of mistakes, and BTC has won the popularity wars, but I am still concerned about lightning. All along, all I wanted was a decentralized, reliable, noninflationary money. However, lightning is becoming very centralized. It seems to be fulfilling all the worst expectations of the BCH / decentralized money advocates.

For example, now in order to use lightning on nostr, you basically have to use a custodial wallet in order to get a lightning address (one of those email formatted addresses for your LN wallet). Yes, you can use your own node, but nobody normal is going to do that. I want a decentralized money for everyone. I don't want everyone to be subject to censorship except for a few geeks running their own nodes.

My real concern now is... can I really support lightning going forward, if it leads to this level of centralized control? Can I really promote this technology if it is going to push everyone into custodial wallets? Or is there some hope on the horizon for true decentralization without people running their own nodes?......

Honestly, I'm not wedded to any particular technology. I just want to truly have free money for everyone -- to allow people to escape fiat. In order to do that, we have to have easy-to-use wallets free of censorship and centralized control, and we need to have merchants accepting it directly so that we aren't subject to bottlenecks in the form of exchanges just to spend our money.

Who here is really willing to respond honestly to this post and think about the future of our monetary freedom? Do we need another solution? Maybe it's something like a different 2L on bitcoin based on zk proofs? I honestly don't care what it is, but we can't be stuck with a technology that is subject to censorship and bottlenecks. We have to preserve and extend the freedom that bitcoin originally envisioned and provided to us.