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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

One drawback of Lightning is that if you want to receive funds, and you don't have a direct channel to the payer, then you have to be online. It's an interactive protocol, you can't just publish an address and check it later. Since most people don't run their own servers, LN is pretty much going to be a custodial system.

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There is actually a solution for that, called Lightning Rod.[0] It should allow asynchronous payment flows when running LN nodes on a mobile device, which are offline most of the time. I'm not sure if it has been implemented yet (probably not).

[0] https://github.com/breez/LightningRod

If you have a lightning channel to the custodial service you use, you can transfer the funds to yourself any time though.

So in contrast to a fiat bank, where you keep your funds permanently, you could use a "lightning bank" just to hold last nights payments and transfer them to yourself every morning. Or you automate the withdrawl to take place every hour.

And: Couldn't your phone be your server? The way I understand LN, receiving funds just means to exchange a few bytes of data. Can't phone apps receive push messages?

Here’s a wallet that runs a node on your phone: https://blixtwallet.github.io

the server you have in your pocket (your phone) is always online and supports multiple communications protocols (NFC, Bluetooth, Wifi, LTE, Audio...)

running an actual server on your phone would absolutely execute your battery life.

if we hadn't had NAT and reverse tunneling then things might have evolved differently. maybe a way to push data to phones over UDP or low power servers that could wake up to handle single requests. but it didn't play out like that.

> if you want to receive funds, and you don't have a direct channel to the payer, then you have to be online

Receiver of funds are normally merchants, and merchants normally already have payment systems that require some kind of connection anyway.

>LN is pretty much going to be a custodial system.

like Chivo? take out the middleman(Banks) and put governments back in control of the funds.

bingo :)

Think about it...

Imagine if you could have complete custodial access, control and oversight of the details of your citizens financial info? No bank accounts, no stash of gold. It all through the US-backed custodial wallet "Trump's Coin purse". Everyone download it now and get $30 free! Also, it's a requirement for all employeers now so, deal with it banks.

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