When I was growing up, the mark of an old fart, was ineptitude in using a computer. I wouldn't say the current generation is as inept as those adults I judged as a kid, but the user interfaces they're used to working with have made them much more inept than I would have been at their age.
non-the-less, I believe we will either grow Bitcoin adoption from new generations with actual neural plasticity, or the user interfaces will dumb down enough to provide no conceivable difference.
Take Pheonix wallet and Breez wallets as examples. In the early days of the lightning network, there was all this channel balancing and opening channels to random people, but these companies made a business model out of scripting out all of that complexity to being an easy to use non-custodial wallet.
Non-custodial lightning wallets work okay right now but in order for bitcoin to succeed, onchain fees will have to increase by quite a bit. If fees were to reach equivalent value today of 50 USD it will make the practicality of using a non-custodial lightning wallet pretty low for the average person.
I think the average person will use custodial lightning for their day to day transactions but keep their saving in self-custody layer 1 wallets.
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You have recency bias anon. I'll remind you that only 6 years ago we didn't have lightning at all and the size for every transaction was much larger. If we were posting back then, we would arguing over how Bitcoin can succeed at on-chain is the only option they have.
The idea of transaction batching, even using a lightning wallet just last year was crazy to a lot of people on SN. Fees are so cheap! Why bother with such a thing! So to then suggest transaction batching, bah, humbug. Now look, Eclair, which the lightning implementation Pheonix uses, has a splicing prototype!
Things are happening! Just keep your ear to the ground and don't expect how things are now to be how they will always be.
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Very true! Things will change and I hope that non-custodial lightning does become much more onchain footprint minimized.
Also other layer 2 solutions like ARK are being explored.
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