365 sats \ 4 replies \ @antic 5 Dec 2023 \ on: Stranded sats redux: sats abandoned on SN? meta
This is an interesting question because it raises the awareness that lightning-based web platforms are (practically speaking) custodial banks behind the scenes. By depositing sats into stacker.news or into any service, you are giving them your sats and trusting that they will uphold your funds for withdrawal later.
There will be a natural fall off of active users who have active balances (people die, move on, forget, and leave balances behind). Ultimately, this creates an opportunity for unethical custodians to implement arbitrary rules for stealing these funds from end users (by assuming they will not claim them).
Additionally, end users may never know if custodians are doing this until a run on the bank occurs since there will be a base layer of liquidity that the platform can probabilistically rely on being present—this is how banks justify fractional reserves.
We are lucky to have the team on stacker.news. Hopefully they remain uncorrupted. But it's a good idea, as with any custodian, to never leave too much of a balance in your live account at any time.
I view the sats I've accrued on SN as funds to devote to the betterment of SN. I haven't withdrawn any for any other purpose. I have total faith in the ethics of the management, but I also expect that if these were funds I was using to live my life, the standard would change, so your takeaway would probably be useful to many.
My only divergence with you would be related to the existential terror I described in a previous comment, of not letting sats disappear into the void. I think if I were in charge, I would say something like: "If your sats haven't moved in ten years after your most recent activity, we sweep them into the SN reward pool." That way if someone dies, they're not lost to the world.
Sort of a water belongs to the tribe thing.
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We grow the SN circular economy ✊
Good ideas, hadn't thought about how custodial websites like these handle this sort of thing
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As a user, I would agree with those terms. It's the correct ethos--and suggesting that people understand how to manage their balance (not use this service like a wallet) and setting up the expectation up front would be ethical IMHO.
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It's not unethical if it's agreed upon from the start. Take AcceptLN's inactivity fees for example. Not all web services want to become a de facto custodian, because it carries costs and legal risks. Encouraging users to withdraw to self-custody is, I'd argue, actually ethical.
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