Been thinking about this since the Spark thing kicked off. Custody wasn't the problem there, the lack of honesty about it was. Same logic here. I know people who are never going to run a node or hold a seed. Not because they're lazy, they have actual lives, and Bitcoin isn't what they're spending their limited free time learning. Doesn't mean they have nothing worth saying.

Went through the obvious answers first. Give them Phoenix, five minutes and they're self custodying, sometimes that's enough. Other times the person doesn't want that responsibility even in its lightest form, they just want to show up and talk. Also looked at fedimint for a while, guardians splitting custody instead of one person holding it all. But if the guardians already know each other, which they would here, it stops being meaningfully different from one trusted person holding funds, just more moving parts, and the newcomer still has to understand what a federation is. Not less friction, different friction. Scratch that for now.

What's left is simpler, fully optional, nobody's obligated: instead of pointing newcomers at another custodial app, back the people you already trust yourself. No fees, no business model. And yes, this is still custody, a hundred percent of it, not dressing it up as anything else, the difference is who's holding it and why. A friend or family member who has something to lose if they screw you over, versus a company you've never met with entirely different incentives than yours.

If I were new here, I'd feel safer with the first one, even knowing either could technically walk off with the funds. Structurally not that far from Spark, just smaller, closer to home, and said out loud instead of dressed up as something it isn't.

Here's how it plays out. A friend of mine, a doctor, zero interest in wallets, writes a post about burnout in emergency rooms because she actually knows the subject. Gets zapped, 20k sats land on her SN account. No wallet attached, so it sits there. She messages me, I send the 20k to her personal Lightning address. Ten seconds, she never touches a seed or a node. That's the whole thing, no new infrastructure, just someone willing to be the last step.

The account should be marked publicly as backed, so nobody mistakes it for something it's not. Not forever, once she's got the time or the interest, it stands on its own. The backers should build a track record too, out in the open. Some will bring in people who add basically nothing, others will give a real voice to people worth hearing, and that should show. It also closes an obvious loophole, you shouldn't be able to zap the account you're backing to farm rewards yourself, only forward what third parties sent, otherwise the value's coming from your own pocket disguised as support. And if someone backs another and just disappears with the funds, there's no contract, only trust, but it's not free either, that reputation is gone publicly, a handful of stolen sats costs more than it's worth.

Doesn't scale, not meant to. Only works with people you actually know, and only if both sides want it.

One more thought before I wrap up, not a proposal, just something worth sitting with. All of this assumes the two of you already know each other closely. But what happens if someone with a big following, a Bitcoin YouTuber, say, ends up backing their whole audience instead of one or two people they actually know. That's a different animal entirely, more reach, sure, but also further from what makes this personal in the first place. Not answering that here, just leaving it as a thread to pull on if any of this goes somewhere. Anyone already doing this, or does it sound naive.