[sgeisler]

To give some technical background: yes, using Lightning (as they seem to do) for affordable BTC payments is challenging for most. As far as I am aware that is why they rely on custodial solutions [1]. People hold their money with someone from their village they trust, which is not ideal but neither is being unbanked. Down the road I could easily see this trust being spread over multiple people using multisig wallets.

The amazing thing about all this is that everyone can become a BTC "bank". You need a bit of capital but orders of magnitude less than a normal bank would require, maybe 2k$ to get started of which you might spend 400$ on hardware and fees to open some channels. The trustless nature of lightning lets you and your users then join the global payment network without asking for permission from anyone and you can engage in commerce internationally.

I think, while we are still early, that this is an awesome experiment. It will highlight the UX problems so we can fix them. Hopefully at some point all this will make sense to the average westerner too, so we can finally have a money not controlled by anyone (states, incumbent banks) again. But that might take a long time.

[1] https://github.com/GaloyMoney/galoy#status-of-the-project

[vmception]

I've always said that the most productive use of the state in response to bitcoin is by helping make better UX, protocols, optional smart contracts for industries (no different than little stickers on plastic bottles or electronics, but way more useful for builders and consumers alike).

This is a great step in that direction.