You can utilize Bitcoin BTC the proper way. The $2 a month net worth person can now use Bitcoin too.

Read the warning section if you find this article too pro-Bitcoin.

Bitcoin BTC is the number one cryptocurrency on Coinmarketcap. Others put it in a different position, but let's assume that being number one is what matters. As you may know already Bitcoin, transaction fees are not cheap, and as such, the Bitcoin community has created protocols that allow for BTC to scale on second layer solutions that are not as secure as the first layer. If you want to have the highest security, you must use layer one.

If you are going to use Bitcoin, you better get a wallet that supports SegWit, which will give you addresses that start with bc1, ledger hardware wallets support that format, as well as Electron. On mobile devices, you can use wallets like Simple Bitcoin Wallet because it helps the best option to send Bitcoin as cheap as possible and because it supports the Lightning Network.

If you don't mind your privacy, you could use custodians as well, which is not recommended because you don't want to be the next Canadian that gets their funds seized by the government; as such self custodian wallets are the way to go.

If you don't have enough funds to open your channel now, you can pay a small fee to let others open a channel to you, and you pay for the service; the downside there is that you will be only connected to that node and to open channels to others you will need to refund your wallet, and that means you will be paying the routing fees to the node that opened your channel to you. This is regardless; you pretty much always have to pay for routing fees which are low and sometimes even free.

My preferred node is the Wallet of Satoshi because I use their custodian service, but I also prefer their node because their routing fees are not as high as others. LNBIG is the node provider that offers to open nodes to you, but I don't know the routing fees they offer.

But once you have your channel, you can start receiving funds up to the level that your channel receiving capacity is full. And once you have enough funds in that bought channel, you can open another channel if you need to empty the first one and have a second channel to continue using LN. Paying nodes to open a channel to you is essential because people can start using Lightning Network without having pre-funded channels.

It is not true that you need to have money before you start receiving money if you are willing to pay for the service to get a channel open to you. This is very important for adoption because it opens up the possibilities for people to start using Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency without using a custodian. If I don't have a channel open, I will be forced to use a custodian; this way, you can use a custodian for a short period to receive your first transaction and after that pay a node operator to open a channel for you to your desire capacity, and after that point, you won't need a custodian any longer. From that point, your transactions will be decentralized and under your control.

If you already have Bitcoin, you need to send your funds to your preferred LN wallet and open a channel to a node that you may select or that you may use; in my case, the nodes I like are: Wallet of Satoshi, FixedFloat, LN-SOV, and Chivo (their node is no longer visible), and if I don't have enough funds I can always pay a few dollars to have LNBIG to open a channel to me.

In other words, If you want to use Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency now, you can. You have to pay attention to it because new features are being added, and you don't have to use custodians. Even if you don't have funds to open your channel, you can always pay someone to give you inbound liquidity.

For example; I have $2 sitting in other cryptocurrencies, but I want to use Bitcoin Lighting Network; if I exchange those funds into LN, I can receive those funds with a custodian, and once in BTC LN, I can pay a node operator to open a channel to me, and that could cost me as low as $1 to have a 0.0034BTC receiving capacity. From that moment, I can receive more than what my $2 allows until the channel is filled, and I can start using LN in a decentralized way. From that moment, I will never need another custodian again as long as I don't close that channel, and I don't have to close that channel over again either.

Conclusion.

The less fortunate people can now use Bitcoin in a decentralized way even if all they have is just $2 funds, and that means third-country citizens can now have their channels with a lot of receiving liquidity even if their net worth is just $2 a month.

This channel cost me $1, and I can receive up to 0.0045BTC

Warning!!

Even if you managed to open a channel by paying someone else to open it for you with just $2, you still would have the issue of commit fee or reserve fee, which means that if transaction fees reach $100 for each transaction, your channel won't have enough liquidity and as costs on-chain grow your channel liquidity will be less. That liquidity will be useless until on-chain fees go down. A $2 pre-funded channel opens liquidity of around 0.003BTC. If costs ever reach $20, your channel could lose half its capacity or even more.

So Bitcoin Cash is still fighting the good fight because of the last statement and reality of the Bitcoin Network today and the commit fee issue of tomorrow once enough usage comes to the BTC network.

By using a service like LNBIG, you will have to accept that the channel operator may not have well-balanced nodes, and as such, your payments may always fail when using the LN. That happened to me, making the channel worthless.