I decided to exchange my Bitcoin Cash into Bitcoin and back to Bitcoin Cash using many non-KYC exchanges. I moved my coins out of Celsius and Nexo because of privacy concerns and the US government messing with Celsius. Once my BCH is back into my new wallet, I will also be using CashFusion, and a week from now, that mixing will be complete.
I decided to open another LN channel again to erase my previous BCH history and start new from a wallet that a KYC custodian doesn't know just because I like privacy a lot, thank you very much. Pretty much, I withdrew my coins from Celsius and exchanged them for stable coins, after that to Bitcoin, and once with Bitcoin, I went and opened an LN channel just because I could. From LN, I went back into Bitcoin Cash. I could not have done that and just straight used CashFusion, but I wanted to write again about how expensive LN is.
Pretty much to send my satoshis this time costs me $1.41 or 2996 satoshis. Mind you, and the node is not the same as the node where I was sending the payment from, so just in routing fees, I paid $1.41. See the picture for proof. The cost was just $0.27 or 577 sats to open. Now my channel is empty because I went and exchanged it back into the real Bitcoin.
That channel still holds hostage around $25 of my hard-earned money as a Reserve fee or the money needed to close the channel around 50,000 satoshis more or less. I was willing to pay that because I wanted to write this article and because I wanted to break the privacy that my last coins had, but imagine if you had to pay that every time you tried to use your money.
Many people in El Salvador will start to use Bitcoin as a currency, but many will never know what is to hold the real Bitcoin because they will always use their government-sponsored bank account and will only realize something is wrong just too late. Suppose you can't manage your private keys on your own. In that case, your custodian can eventually implement fractional reserve practices or just outright print Bitcoin. You will never know until suddenly you find yourself in need to liquidate to a non-custodian solution and your bank account tells you sorry you can't spend your money that way because of technical issues.
I don't trust custodians of any form, which is why I hold my channels, but I am rich enough to pay $25 for that privilege, and Salvadorians won't have that privilege because $25 is what they could be earning in a whole week.
I always find it hard to justify Bitcoin transaction fees on either of both networks, and I do have the funds to pay for those fees. Still, Bitcoin was supposed to be a peer-to-peer currency for everyone worldwide, but with costs beyond $1, you will be letting many humans that could benefit from a decentralized bank system out of the loop. Yet, here we are celebrating that poor people will be using a government-sponsored custodian on an impoverished nation.
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Bitcoin used to work properly, but that was many years ago. Today it's basically broken.