i'm not charging much on my routing fees right now, i make more from my swap service. also i pass on most of my earnings to partner nodes that use my earning api right now.

it varies by the day, but a typical day would be something like:

• 500k sats earned from swaps
• 200k sats earned from routing (mostly to LOOP)
• 500k sats paid to node runners who use my earning api

the biggest day i ever had so far earned ~1m sats from swaps

in college 2013-2014, some kids were mining bitcoin in their dorms. i was like, oh, and didn't think much of it.

in 2016 i saw an article, asked a family friend about it, and he said "i think blockchain tech is cool but not convinced about bitcoin" lol. so i bought like $40 of bitcoin

in early 2017 i asked god to give me a good investment, and soon i started seeing things about bitcoin and ethereum, so i bought some more. 2017 i was a total shitcoiner, it was bad! but eventually learned that shitcoins suck.

in 2018 i started teaching myself bitcoin programming, then got a job at BitGo

too much shitcoinery at BitGo, so I left for Cash App in 2019, and been there ever since, working on the bitcoin hot wallets and lightning stuff

i'm not thrilled about the concept of alternative assets on lightning. i also think it will take a while for Taro to get a network of users. it is very far behind the current stablecoins

but that said, if it brings more volume to lightning, i guess i'm ok with that

i think there will be 10,000+ profitable nodes (slightly profitable), but I think the biggest profits (and %APY) will be had by the ~10-20 biggest nodes. And then a constant churn of another 10,000 or so nodes who are unprofitable.

each node is itself a network, and the value of a network increases exponentially w/ the number of connections (metcalfe's law). which is why i think the top nodes will have a big advantage over the smaller nodes

i'm pretty greedy and competitive, so like 9 maybe lol

i'd like to see continued privacy enhancements, particularly around protecting the identity of receivers

i worry that Tor is not going to work well enough, everyone defaults to clearnet, and then we start seeing governments crack down on clearnet usage

i worry that "yield farming" on lightning will hit a mania phase, the market for inbound liquidity goes through a speculative bubble, and retail gets rekt somehow

interesting! i'll need to read more on that.

my first impression is I think we may see some crystallization to an extent, but there will always be churn and instability, as is the nature of most human systems

biggest challenges as a routing node operator:

• keeping flows and channels balanced
• ensuring you're not opening up opportunities for your liquidity to get drained
• what to set the fees!?

biggest operational challenges for cash app:

• dealing with the constraints the legal team put on us that we can only connect to 3-4 vetted peers lol. makes routing payments for low fees much harder when you are restricted with who you can connect to
• keeping the deposit invoices small enough to scan was an interesting challenge. the more nodes you have, the more route-hints you need in the invoice. not too hard to solve (just select which nodes you wanna put in the route hints) but i was interesting

i don't have any good recommended strategies that would work well for under like 0.5 BTC of capital, but that's not to say there won't be something better in the future

i think spending a lot of time with athletes, i learned how to be dumb. i feel like i'm half dumb. so i think that helps me keep things simple in software.

1. I learned in school mostly (high school + studied computer science in college), but after that I learned by trying to build stuff and using free online materials (google is a programmers best friend!)
2. I don't mind too much what others do! I think it can be worth it be run unprofitably for a little as a way to gain experience. And if a node is unprofitable it just means they're giving profits to other nodes (or miners!)

for managing liquidity, i have a bunch of scripts i wrote. but also at times have used things like these:

charge-lnd for fee setting (https://github.com/accumulator/charge-lnd) lightning-jet for automated rebalancing (https://github.com/itsneski/lightning-jet) lndg for node management (https://github.com/cryptosharks131/lndg)

i personally use LND for my deezy node - it is the easiest to get running and has the most extensive ecosystem of tooling around it.

i don't think LDK will supplant LND as the leader for most nodes. I do think LDK will be extremely useful for a few major apps (I think the biggest self-custodial lightning apps will find LDK has the tooling they need to make it happen). LDK is great when you wanna do something more customized

i haven't read much sci-fi, but I liked Ender's Game

also not a novel, but i'm a huge fan of Rick and Morty

i would like to see more focus on ensuring all the node implementation remain compatible (sometimes there are weird issues where different node implementations have problems working together)

i also would like to see some solutions to the known attacks that exist on lightning

keeping flows and channels balanced! also bootstrapping at the beginning was a grind!

i am surprised and excited by how global the lightning network is. seeing volume from nodes in india, south america, south asia, etc is super cool and makes me feel like we're really onto something here

how u mean