Anybody with a node can be that custodian, as I described in these guides.

Nothing really stopping local community members from being a custodian and being an LSP or using fedimint to give users easy access to Bitcoin, and that trust is handled by the fact that you know that person, and you can vet everyone you custody for so the trust can go both ways, but its not exactly scalable

If you're looking to be a custodian at scale, where your focus is on providing a reliable service at a profit, you need scale and to earn trust you become an entity that people can find and sue, regulate, close down, its a business.

How many people are going to do business with an anon custodian? Very few if any to make it worth anyones time.

If you provide your service entirely over Tor, you can already become virtually untraceable if you practice good opsec.

Now the problem is, who will trust a bussiness that you can't put a face to, that you can't have a legal quarry with? It would be a matter of years of hard work to build up the reputation to operate at a big scale.

Dark markets are like this.

Then they rug everyone.

IMO this isn't happening because the software stacks for Lightning still suck

Running a server for any of it isn't intuitively a mobile thing either

And what's the incentive for going through the hassle? At what scale does it even become worth it?

We can lower these barriers with better software, ideally custodial servers are nothing more than a public key using a more p2p-like network, that's easy to run on a residential connection and monetize.

WIP