Bitcoin is hard to use, and Lightning Network just adds an insult to injury. Convincing everyone to run their own self-sovereign nodes is a pipe dream. It would be nice, but it’s impossible. It’s like some kind of communist utopia, except for the fact that it’s radically capitalist in its nature. I’m in no way discourage setting up self-hosted nodes, but we also need to think about the people who won’t do that, for various reasons. How do we connect them to Bitcoin infrastructure?

There are a few mobile wallets which look promising. Most of them are overly centralized, which makes them just an incremental improvement over our legacy financial system. We can do better, and Breez Wallet is a good example. Breez allows people to accept LN payments instantly, it’s open source, and it doesn’t rely on a centralized backend in any significant way.

Breez-like wallets are great for merchants who want to accept Bitcoin but don’t know how. Needless to say, many merchants in developing countries don’t even have enough extra money to buy a hardware for their own Bitcoin full node. Breez only needs a smartphone an Internet connection, which widens its audience. This wallet can also be used for sending payments, and the fee it charges is pretty low.