Self custody has no concept of privacy. By your standards most people self custodying are not actually self custodying. This does not align with reality. Unfortunately you don’t seem to understand how these systems work. We have docs if you’re interested.

Yes, having unilateral control of your funds is self custody. Now with Spark there are some caveats to this but it has nothing to do with the wider privacy conversation.

I still see you mixing up privacy and self custody. I think it makes no sense at all.

well... do you want good, reliable, secure software or do you prefer, reliable politicians?

I’m sorry but that’s forever going to be a minority of people so in the meantime there’s a lot of work to do in terms of mitigating privacy compromises involved by interacting with 3rd party services.

> and if they do, there's no plan B. no fallback. what do you mean there’s no plan B? build your own. no one is being forced to use Spark. heck I’m working on an alternative if you like. there will be many different options, that’s the point of an open, permissionless market

most Bitcoin transactions aren’t submitted via Bitcoin Core or a self-sovereign node, hopefully that’s obvious

> you can't collect analytics on which IP address submitted a Bitcoin transaction in many (most?) cases that’s obviously not true >it’s not decentralized yes, that’s the entire point. that’s how it’s able to offer better self custodial UX > this will be a risk if a huge number of wallets use it as a back-end I agree it’s a disaster if all mainstream wallets just use Spark on the backend. Or Arkade. We need a multitude of service providers and options.

We agree the privacy aspects are problematic but “if I custody it, the it’s private” is just a flat out wrong assumption to make as onchain Bitcoin is obviously not private.

Spark, like Ark, is an open source protocol. Anyone can run a server if they want to, just like LSPs.

Ark is a client server protocol so everyone running their own server would defeat the point. Even while using Lightning there are significant ways a third-party wallet service can fingerprint your information and collect it. There are no perfect solutions.

privacy and censorship resistance are completely different than custody. if spark refuses you service you can simply switch to a different service provider. Lightning has similar challenges with LSPs. the idea that everyone will run everything p2p is a pipedream, though it’s great to have the option as last recourse, ofc

(and this is only relevant to our Arkade implementation, can’t speak for others)

correct me if I’m wrong but this is an issue with every single centralized services, wallet or client-server protocol. of course there are mitigations against it that can be taken both on the server as well as client side. the protocol can be reinforced as well on the privacy side. we are definitely looking at all available options. not sure what you mean by “run a service”

to be clear: forced inclusion is a larp. it requires L1 transactions which is no more useful than withdrawing onchain. if the operator can censor you then you get zero of the benefits from the L2