Thread by @rorshockbtc

I’ll come out as one cautious but largely supportive of this take. I’m writing this from my individual point of view, not a custodian point of view. 🧵

https://twitter.com/_pretyflaco/status/1657007944867667970

If you haven’t been outside the US or EU to a developing country, or if you have but stayed in a nice part of a big city or a hotel/resort, you may want to listen before you speak. To help, imagine this:

You live along route CA-2 in El Salvador in a rusted, corrugated aluminum shack that’s 250sf and has a rope for a door. You earn $30 a day, on a good day, and share your home with your parents, spouse, and 3 children. Your entire life revolves around cash.

Or you live in Comuna 13 in Medellin, Colombia. Your community is improving gradually, but still controlled by gangs. You’re in high school, your friends outside 13 are afraid to visit you, and your friends inside 13 are joining gangs, selling coke, or selling sex. Or all three.

Or you live in the Maldives where you work at a regional airport. There are 350 ppl on your island. You have no waste management. You make $30 a day. The only way off your island is a $210 plane ticket. There is no bank, no phone service, no phones, no computers, no cars.

These are real world, right now lifestyles for over 1 billion people. They’re happy with their lives; family is near, but they dream of bigger things, maybe to see a friend who moved away, or to provide better food for their family, or to get healthcare for an ill child.

I think @_pretyflaco is right. If you’re in one of these areas, self-custody is scary. Your home isn’t safe, at least not if people know you’re storing your life savings there. You may be a victim of gangs, and believe you’ll be robbed again. Travel is difficult, need local.

In those cases, and there are a LOT of them, the best way for people to get started and be protected is using a trusted, ideally semi-local but also distributed custodial wallet. To start with. At least.

There are a lot of cool things that can happen if you keep an open mind and think about custodial wallets and what they could be. Here’s one that’s related to an idea I have, but it’s a variation on a theme.

Imagine a community running on Lightning and Nostr. Reputation is big, and people carry cheap but effective NFC-ID cards that connect to their Nostr page, which is part of their Nostr community run on a local relay, and this community is managed by a distributed M of N setup.

The individual can scan their card wherever to receive and send payments. Even without internet, their username can be written down, and phoned/etc in. To pay, a user is commented at and the payor/payee is tagged, along with total purchase amount.

The user could also pay directly, but they could spend/receive in this way. The user has the protection of a custodial wallet that batches out transfers at the end of the day. By choosing this slower option compared to direct xfer, the user is risking their entire reputation…

And all of their social connections to their entire village if they’re secretly a rascal.

This has a ton of potential for abuse, just as it has a lot of utility. Regardless, it would be easier, faster, and cheaper to roll this out at scale than any PoS or large scale hardware.

Shipping machines (or anything) to a lot of these towns is horrifically inefficient, sometimes impossible. If you could accomplish this with NFC credit cards and cell phones or basic relays, even telegraph, it would simplify things.

It does go against the idea of trustless money, it’s undeniable. I still think there is a way it could be done that would represent a good trade off. Not sure if my solution is the right one as presented, but it’s possible. That’s saying a lot.

The presumption of physical security is not reality for a lot of the world. Safe deposit boxes aren’t either. If you’re living in a hut and MS-13 comes by and starts flaying your child, telling you to surrender your seed phrase bc they know you have Bitcoin… few would resist.

If, on the other hand, your funds were locked behind a duress-preventing social network proof where you were required to pay to a Nostr account that was verified, the person robbing you would be doxxed immediately. It has appeal for some people, ideal or not.

Obviously limiting someone’s ability to transact is dystopian, Revelations stuff. But limiting someone’s chance of getting robbed is important. There’s a role for custodians, in limited and highly scrutinized ways, to be a force for good.

I’m not sure what the final form looks like, or if the potential evil is a nonstarter for me, but I do see and know people who would be grateful for ANY solution.

Maybe instead of telling them what to do, we could learn more about what they need? Then we could help build it.

@threadreaderapp unroll this for the plebs not on Twitter plz