One of the value propositions of Lightning (maybe I misunderstood?) are that there are "no fees". For Lightning to Lightning this is mostly correct, but the cost to set up channels and all that stuff still counts as "fees" in my mind. Might as well give me 3% visa surcharge in that case.
This is not a bad thing, it is just early days that has seen engineering solutions where more UX is needed IMO.
I feel this is a UX problem that will be solved eventually with some kind of technical magic with autobuying cheap liquidity / ELTOO + BIP118 or something.
The issue is that if you want to use Lightning for receiving any kind of regular income you will be constantly opening channels as you run out of liquidity. I don't see how you can currently use Lightning like you would use a bank account where you receive a lot, and spend only a part of that.
The big questions include "What even is a wallet?" and "How can Lightning infrastructure integrate into the paradigm of accounts / saving / checking / income and expenses" that most people are used to for their daily life.
The workaround for this is to use a custodial solution or LSP that manages the inbound liquidity for you "under the covers" and you swap out on a regular basis to on-chain and self-custody bitcoin.
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Can you please provide an example setup of this?
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WoS to receive lightning and swap out using boltz.exchange to your cold storage.
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Thanks. I think it is early days but would be interesting to see this functionality get abstracted away for future average users in as much of a self-custodial way as possible. How does liquidity swapping work?
E.g. If I max out my inbound liquidity and you max out your outgoing, we can somehow join them back together?
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The way I use it is as follows: I buy small amount of Bitcoin on robosats. The sats I receive via Lightning. I want the lightning btc on-chain, so I go to boltz.exchange and specify the amount I want to receive on-chain, I provide the btc address, pay the lightning invoice and voila, I have moved sats off the lighting network and my custodial wallet is mostly empty!
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