pull down to refresh
In retrospect, I think that my second criterium was met 16 years ago, right about when I sarcastically told my buddy thanks for the pitch about this bitcoin thing and then didn't look at it for 2.5 years or so. It's been under pressure from time to time, mostly from shitcoiners like Tether or more recently some even more idiotic shit, but what we have today is really amazing, compared to the bitcoin 0.7.2 install I messed with.
It does pain me at times to see the growth of custodial solutions and being challenged by people in the wild explaining to me how much better TRON is than anything that ever existed. But in the end, middlemen be middling and I guess the thing that the AI labs got right is that education works a lot better if you have a stick and a carrot than organically.
I think your second criterium is already met. I've just zapped you from my LN node funded with self custody Bitcoin.
The fact that most people don't care or aren't willing to run one is not really a problem or at least not a problem any payments "solution" can fix.
I think email is a great invention (definitely not perfect, but that's not the point) because it allows people to self host their server. Not because everyone does. And that foxes many things in terms of incentives.
Maybe I'm seeing it as an emergency exit. If it exists and works, it's as good as it gets. It doesn't really need to be used by everyone at once for it to be a successful good door.