We manage Diamond Hands node to this day, though not as active now compared to in the past.
The initial impression of it is just something new and stimulating. I really felt excited about more and more new nodes popping up and we were at the forefront of the emerging Lightning economy. At the time, we didn't really have any financial motive and routing was more of intellectual curiosity for us, but it was all fun.
Now, as we need to work on other stuff including event planning, wallet development, B2B development etc, we cannot spare as much time on it unfortunately.
I think the biggest difference is that routing node management is becoming more and more professional and it's getting more and more difficult for individual small node runners now, which was sort of expected anyways.
With that said, now the conference is over, we're planning to assign a bit more resources on routing again and look deeper into it. It's not 100% yet, but the DH node may make a nice comeback in the routing world soon.
this territory is moderated
How did you weather the large number of force-closes during the fee-hikes caused by Ordinal bullshit?
-> Oh it was ugly for us as well. We improved our HTLC monitoring environment and mitigated the issue a bit, but still it sucked a big time and we lost some money due to FCs, too. I was crying in my heart lol
How do you see the future of running a LN routing node for amateurs? Will it become solely suitable for people doing it full-time job?
-> Seems it's becoming more and more of the latter now.
On the other hand, it's still not very professional just yet and individual node runners still have hope for profitable routing experience in my opinion. Tools around automative channel creations or liquidity management via different swap services need to improve further though.
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