For companies with a calendar year close it's almost time to close 2022...

At Layers, we are working to save time and manual resources for LN node operators to help provide audit reporting and corroborate their node data as they close their books.

First two audit reports for your node are free here: https://www.layers.cloud/

The Lightning Network is not a blockchain. This is a feature - it provides instant settlement, scalability, and privacy in payments.

But it also brings challenges and new considerations for auditability.

This post offers insight into Lightning Network audit considerations - especially as the mantra of 'Don't Trust, Verify' becomes increasingly important.

Building audit solutions for Lightning - Audit your Lightning node and get a list your network activity with channel opens/closes and their tx details and capacity - all exportable via CSV for your records.

Thanks, this is correct - @Layers provides a window into public data available to everyone. One of the biggest challenges to LN is that the data is an evolving graph (not a blockchain). We provide infrastructure to provide deterministic, time series based data (that anyone could also collect) - and provide analysis and reporting on specific aspects of the datasets that can be valuable.

As of now, all LN public channel opens and closes are broadcast to the network, and with the proper aggregation and data collection this data is all visible.

Transaction level data, forwards, and the balances within a channel are all private and known only to the node operator.

The Lightning Network therefore combines the best of auditability back to the Bitcoin blockchain, and privacy with respect to transaction data.

More details to come this week in a detailed write up...

Thank you! You'll automatically be entered when you verify and display your node, but you're welcome to send any rewards to the node of your choice. Africa Free Routing is currently in second and I'm sure they would appreciate any support (https://bitcoiners.africa/africa-free-routing/)

This is great, and I love your ideas of forking and mixing lists as well. Will absolutely get this on the short term feature roadmap, and thanks again for your help here - I appreciate it and will reach out as we get started on this.

@jeff - thank you so much for this incredible feedback. Dune Analytics is spot on with empowering everyone with the tools to amplify everyone else, and we'd love to get to this point from a technical/feature perspective over time to amplify the growth and highlights of the LN and its activity.

Your idea of curated lists for directories/categories is great. To make sure I understand your idea, you would login (via node signature, LN, or email), create any list(s) of node categories by adding in their pubkeys/aliases, publish your list(s) - and then either you or anyone else could see this list, the aggregations and visuals associated - and possibly vote, star, and favorite these and see them over time?

Already excited to get going on something like this - this is very helpful and much appreciated 🙏

Thanks @kr 🙏

Looking for some ideas on increasing node capacity?

This post has some ideas (for example, a liquidity swap doubles total capacity): https://blog.exponentiallayers.com/how-to-increase-lightning-network-node-capacity/

And this Stacker News post has some great insight and strategies for running a node: #44747