Lightning Labs is doing really good things to help build the network. They're not even paying me to say this. I think building for apps enables the ecosystem to grow in a healthy way.

We hired our first two employees in April, bringing us to a total team of 4. We're tiny, but the investors that we've taken on have been very supportive to help us think through the obstacles that we'll face in the future.

As a company (and this will probably apply to all early lightning businesses), we have to find the right balance between building products much earlier than they are needed (or profitable) and being prepared for big competition that will soon arrive.

I'd expect that VISA, Paypal, Meta and others will enter the lightning space and be extremely well capitalized to build some incredible products, much faster than we'd be able to. But, we're a team of bitcoiners already that want a decentralized future and we've got a small headstart. We'll have to be strategic and innovative to stay ahead.

This is a really tough question. Our thinking is that this is user experience driven and by making liquidity as easy as possible to access (and access quickly) will be the biggest driver of marketshare. We also want to have the depth of liquidity and that's stemming from being interoperable across implementations.

There's a few things that we're optimizing for with Magma: Speed, User Experience, and Reliability. It may not the cheapest place to get liquidity or the most on-chain efficient, so users that want to optimize for those qualities will likely choose other options. But lightning network operator time is precious and probably the dominant cost of running a routing node.

Sign me up for a boss battle with the horse-sized duck. Bring some good 8-bit theme songs.

We don't actually know who is a profitable node and who isn't. Even if someone told us how much profit they're making off their routing node, we can't know whether they are telling the truth. I've run a profitable node in the past using static fees, but now I see people using automation tools extensively to maximize their incomes based on data internal to an individual node. I'm watching the effect of Zero Fee Routing's management strategy really take off and inspire others to do the same. With zero routing fees, we're seeing more people choose to frontload their routing earnings through channel sales on Magma, which is something that we can verify. 2+% APY is pretty good and that's before any income that they'd make from actually routing!

Amboss is a data analytics company that helps lightning network operators make good decisions about how they operate. When choosing whom to open a channel to, users come to Amboss to help make their decision. Users that join Prime (our subscription product) will be able to see more data (historical) as well as access services to help them market their node as a great node to connect to. These are services that we're happy to provide to our users as customers.

I don't see advertising as a long term revenue model for us because it turns our users into the product. Lightning network users generally want to escape surveillance capitalism and furthering advertising as a business model would conflict with some of the core desires of the network.

Our liquidity marketplace, Magma, currently earns a bit off of commissions and we're openly exploring how best to price the matchmaking service we provide.

I like these questions, pls answer

We're really interested in improving the liquidity tools available and collaborating with merchants and exchanges to design for their current and future needs.

Additionally, we're exploring what the data market will look like. Since lightning is private by design and we're all so curious what's happening on it, what will the effect be of sharing information and how will the incentives evolve?

We're trying out lots of different avenues since lightning has so much potential and just trying not to duplicate the efforts of other builders in the space.

Speaking from personal experience: running a lightning node without a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is reckless. Even in the US, the electrical grid is pretty unreliable when it comes to delicate hobbyist hardware. A UPS is cheap insurance when it comes to protecting your sats!

Omg I use so many hahaha. For the most transactions, I probably use @lntxbot the most, but I really like bluewallet for when I'm out and about and Strike so I don't have to think about capital gains taxes in the US. I've used Zeus for when I need my node, but I will often switch to using Thunderhub via Tor mobile for the fully featured aspects.

Other wallets I use: Wallet of Satoshi Muun Phoenix (also good for out n about)

While I'm at least a mostimalist if not a full-blown maximalist, I think people will want to see stablecoins on lightning, which essentially means a DEX based in bitcoin. The major driver in this will be the user experience. A key component in the user experience is how much prior knowledge is required and unfortunately that may mean that people will use fiat over the lightning network before they are comfortable with bitcoin itself.

Another driver is a mature market for the time-value of bitcoin. How much can people earn as yield by keeping their savings in bitcoin and using it on the lightning network? With negative interest rates in Europe and the developed world, I don't see people wanting to keep their funds in depreciating fiat assets with negative interest rates.

There's an immense amount of changes that will happen in the next year. From my perspective, I'd expect that we'll see the start of other assets on lightning and the industry scrambling to keep up with the adoption that could quickly follow.

I think lightning adoption will diverge somewhat from bitcoin adoption. We'll see people using the financial network in a separate fashion from using base layer bitcoin.

On a regulatory front, I'd expect that lightning will be a much bigger talking point as a tool for financial efficiency, stability, and inclusion.

Going from working for someone else to being almost entirely self-directed was both the scariest and most rewarding transition by far. While I still feel impostor syndrome, just completing often very dumb tasks to build a business is giving me way more confidence. I also feel much more aligned. While working for someone else, lightning was a distraction, but it was too important to ignore, so now I get to focus on it full time.

My life got turned completely upside-down, but I'm free to be nomadic while working harder than I've ever worked and feeling good about it. Also, explaining what I do for work to normal people is now a Herculean task.

Just being on Stacker.News is a great way to get exposure to how powerful lightning network is...we're paying each other to make great content over the internet, independent of where we are on the globe or what borders are between us. Borderless, frictionless commerce with next to zero fees is a real game changer.

For comparison, take a look at the fees that VISA charges its merchants (who pass it onto their customers). Looking through the table of fees to merchants, I don't see a single option that is less than $0.10 plus a percentage fee (0.05% - 3.15%). On the consumer side, this debt is charged an additional ~10-25% interest for those that carry a balance.

For a merchant, there is only a choice between three providers: VISA, MasterCard, American Express. On Lightning, there are 16,000 possible providers that are competing to process your transactions. Currently, there are 46 offers on Magma alone that can provide the same payment processing service at an average price of 2.27% APR.

Lightning is an open market, traditional payment methods are closed markets running an oligopoly.

I play guitar and cello, take walks on trails, plan trips, and talk to strangers.

Thank you for the kind words! Lightning is extremely open for innovators and builders. A big barrier in adoption of lightning is the UI/UX with tons of promising projects already in existence. Just by being a user and providing feedback provides tremendous value. With your experience in startups, you may be able to help others that won't be as prepared when speaking with VCs. Translating what bitcoiners are working on to traditional investors is a really hard task, but those that can recognize the scale of the opportunity in lightning will benefit tremendously.

Electric!

Thanks for the encouragement!!

The most surprising was probably how the view of the lightning network isn't uniform across the network. Everyone has their own perspective of the channels that exist and the nodes that are present.

Second to that, it's how brilliant the users are. We get to learn so much from all of the different approaches to lightning, fee management, making connections etc. The feedback that we receive is extremely valuable.