I am only a home owner because the value of my deflationary BTC savings dramatically outpaced inflationary USD savings account interest.

If bitcoin is coming in constantly you get it at the average price via dollar cost averaging and the average value of Bitcoin has trended sharply up for a decade.

Selling BTC for USD is most likely a loss to inflation if you intend on holding for a year or more.

You gambled your money against other people. You won, and they lost. Their losses paid for your house.

12m y/y bitcoin is up 8% and the S&P is up 18%, so if you gambled your money into bitcoin a year ago, you made a bad choice. Note that last week bitcoin was down 5% y/y. Bitcoin, y/y is hardly beating USD inflation, right now, after a major increase in the price today.

Also, stop comparing a speculative asset to a currency. USD isn't meant to be held as an investment. It's meant to be spent, or invested in an asset that appreciates more than inflation.

Lightning is worse than that. When you do try to convert from BTC to USD, you pay a transaction fee twice. Once to close the channel, and another to transfer to the party where you want to exchange your BTC.

And further, you can't predict the fee you'll pay. And I hope you aren't in a hurry to settle in those cases.

As Lightning grows so will USD to Lightning custodial services. I’d be surprised if there weren’t any you could use right this minute, actually.

I'm not really sure how that changes anything I said. You're naïve if you think the service isn't going to pass those costs onto their users.

And if you need to resort to a custodial service, what are you even using BTC for? Using a custodian to give you permission to enter and exit a market is antithetical to everything Bitcoin stands for and exactly what it was created to fix.