All those complications you mentioned, midwives are trained to respond to.

Great question. If "fate" here means ultimately fading away vs. Bitcoin, I hope they eventually do! I just see them as an important interim stepping stone to that future state whether it's via supporting stablecoins on Lightning or other use cases that can serve as additional ways by which people stumble their way onto the Bitcoin network (vs. getting bogged down elsewhere).

I'm repasting below something I shared in another post to give you a flavor of what those interim stepping stones look like for us at Joltz in a loyalty & rewards context:

Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother.

So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.

Learning how to batch onchain transactions to make them cheaper.

Great idea. I am not sure how many of us have a Bitcoin Talk account but I think you are on the right track here. I am going to add an SN link and referral to my Nostr account and the sports territory twitter account.

One of my focuses in 2025 will be how to better market the territory and SN more broadly. Ultimately we want more than just Bitcoiners to join the site but the fact that we can't even seem to convert the low hanging fruit users is puzzling to me. I don't think it is a problem with the site or the content, it is getting people to understand the value proposition and to try it out.

One way that I thought might work well and I briefly tested but admittedly didn't do consistently or enough is finding good posts on other platforms. Reposting them on SN and then contacting the OP on the other platform to say "I reposted this on Stacker News. It earned x amount of sats. I would be happy to zap them to you". I did have one person join SN that way but it wasn't as successful as I expected. Although, granted I only did it 5 or 6 times.

I appreciate you are thinking about these things and kind of spearheading our open source community marketing campaign.

I might be biased but I think in Switzerland people are very excited about bitcoin, both bottom-up (20% of people hold BTC) and top-down (regulators are very open about BTC).
Our users mostly come from Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy and France, and also Spain and Czech Republic seem to have high adoption rates from what I hear.
I think the Northern and Eastern European countries are in general still more passive, I wouldn't say pessimistic though, they just need more time! :)

That’s the most pathetic take I’ve ever heard. I will not change the English language for your degeneracy.

https://m.stacker.news/48827
@siggy47 soon you will have my guide about @Alby hub (as you asked), with all the pro / contra aspects, options and suggestions.
It's a very interesting territory, as self-custodial node, that I had the opportunity to test it briefly.
I want to test it more with various backends funding sources, but right now I am quite busy with my citadel building and cannot fully concentrate on testing more LN nodes.

Will come back with a nice guide.

Properly citing your sources whenever possible - even if not necessarily as formal as in academia. For example:

Citing your sources is important because it:
- Allows you to avoid plagiarism
- Establishes the credentials of your sources
- Backs up your arguments with evidence
- Allows your reader to verify the legitimacy of your conclusions

Source: Scribbr Citation Generator

"If voting mattered, they wouldn't let us do it"