Wonderful analogy, love it!

Yeah I think KP said something on a lightning twitter spaces once that made sense to me.

As a lightning node operator, you're locking up your BTC capital in a hot wallet that has risk. You deploy that capital into channels essentially as a bet that there will be monetizable activity on those channels in the near future. By charging fees on transactions that you route, you earn yield on that capital.

Deploying your BTC into a lightning node is absolutely not as safe as keeping it in cold storage, which is ideally where many people would be keeping it.

However, in exchange for taking on that risk, noticing those information asymmetries in the lightning market, and maintaining your node to stay in an optimal condition to route payments, you can be rewarded with yield. With those natural incentives in place, we don't need to rely on just good faith of the community for functionality and reliability--it's an investment opportunity and a business venture. As a node operator, you are providing a service to other nodes in the market and other users in the lightning network. In exchange for providing that service, you are rewarded with fees.

I'd say with people on SN trying to stack sats, it's more of a psychological hurdle, rather than a business problem. Nobody is earning a living on SN just yet, so the sats are (sadly) still at a similar level of functionality and impact as reddit upvotes. However, with a psychological problem, there's always a psychological solution. Governments have convinced masses of men to willingly go to war and fight people they've never met. I'm sure with a little PR, there can be more of a "pass it on" mentality in the SN community.

That is true, and I think that kind of architecture is definitely way easier to automate than a full-on routing node! Merchants don't need outbound unless they'd want to pay out their employees in lightning, which is functionality that I doubt many would want to pay for.

However, for the average business owner, it's still really challenging to figure all those details out even for a simple setup. They'd have to be an enthusiastic Bitcoiner who has knowledge about how Lightning works, what Loop is, etc.

But that's the beauty of where we can come to help! Setting up batteries-included simple UX systems that give the functionality and security users expect is a major opportunity.

Be sure to check out https://plebnet.wiki

Also, LNDg is a popular tool for channel management with minimal work once set up correctly. I know people with > 5 BTC liq who use it routinely. https://github.com/cryptosharks131/lndg

100% the biggest area of potential in the ecosystem is the merchants. After all, routing nodes won't have much to route if no merchants are accepting lightning payments.

With a bit of automation, a merchant can be able to securely accept lightning payments with a node they control. Once the UX is there, it's really just about onboarding more merchants and regular users to the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem.

My pleasure! Thanks for reading it. 🙏