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I don't think that that is supposed to be a final state per se?
Indeed. CCs are not the final state and Spark is not the final state. They are placeholders until the solution scarcity is resolved.
If I weren't prioritizing SN's longevity, and my vision of bitcoin, I would bring back a capped custodial wallet. It would be easier and, if I ceded earlier, I would've saved myself two years of work (and all the other costs of doing something this hard while catching all the normal arrows of trying to do something nice for people).
Capping custody sounds like a road to more pain, as often, after one requirement comes the next, and then Bitcoin NgU really screws with limits because those are always expressed in fiat.
So pre-empting away custody was and still is imho the only sane move. The above isn't criticism - I think that ultimately many among us feel kind of helpless in this situation right here, right now, because there are no silver bullets.
if I ceded earlier
Not long ago you asked me, "Do you know what makes you want hard mode?". Now is the time to return that question:
Do you know what makes you want hard mode? <3
Doing hard things is a shortcut to being useful because most people don't want to do hard things. I want to be useful. I want to be proud of myself. I want other people to have an easier time being proud of themselves and being useful. I want to help The Human Project succeed and I'm too dumb to find easy ways to do that.
Or I'm a masochist and that's how I rationalize it.
So the way I read this, and this too is just my interpretation, so don't take what I am about to say as fact:
It is impossible to take custody of both the deposit and the withdraw side of sats without being a money transmitter / bank. This is why SN works the way it works today. It's a compliance issue and this is being taken seriously by SN, because it is a corporation, not someone's underground hobby project. The CC tradeoff is a feature of compliance requirements, and as shitty as it may be, it is there for a reason.
Spark offers a technical way to automate wallet creation similar to how you'd do it on L1 (offline receive to a key) and thus offers integration in an embedded manner without SN being on the hook for the custody. The only other thing that could enable that are bArk and
npub.cashbut these are even less mature and have similar issues. So bottom line there is a solution scarcity and this is a bid to potentially move away from some of the less optimal tradeoffs - from an SN and a newbie perspective - i.e. the ability to move past the CCs solution.If we take SN not being the custodian as a non-negotiable, then there are other solutions and all of them are worse and IIRC would require partnership with a custodian. The other "fake L2" solutions are not going to change much; a user has similar risk on Liquid, and similar utxo-size economic exit prevention caveats on Ark. Thus there is no ideal solution. Spark is one of the not-ideal solutions.
So this isn't much going back to a situation where SN is a custodian; I don't think that that should be desirable anyway. I see this as the opposite direction: a forward one where SN holds less sats and credits that are 1:1 valued as sats, not more. I think that the thing that people fall over isn't so much the direction as the dependency on Spark in particular, and maybe the prominence of that in the onboarding process. I don't think that that is supposed to be a final state per se? It's just another experiment to see how this direction goes. Unfortunately, per k00b's words in the release post, the other ones aren't ready to get integrated, so it's this or there is no experiment. Since no one is forced to use it, it's fine with me. The disclaimers are good. I wish there were better alternatives.