Lightning and the channel problem

I've been playing around with Lightning and Bitcoin for maybe a year or two. I am in no way a player in the space, and buy twenty bucks worth of sats here and there. But by far I'm not a big spender, not even close.

Most of my time in Sat land has been on Alby, which is a great service. It has worked beautifully for some time now. I really can't say enough good things about it. But there is a dark cloud looming.

With the GetAlby migration to using Alby hub, the one big problem Alby solved for us bitcoin lite weights was the fact that we didn't have to plop down hundred+ thousand sats to open a channel, let alone multiple channels.

I am at a loss now, I am playing with some different things, I moved some sats over to Breeze, about 10k only to have 2.5k taken in fees. It's great for zaping and boosting, but loading that puppy up hurts.

So, I am at this point where I'm not sure what to do. Eventually I will suck it up and start my own node, save up and open some channels, and carry on with the crusade.

But this makes it hard for me to speak to the cause for newbs. How are they to get started? There really needs to be an easy solution to this coming, and soon. Once everything is Alby Hub only, it will be like we took a step backwards.

#plebone #bitcoin #lightning #nostr