Hi Danny, thanks for all your work in the Bitcoin and Lightning space, and thanks for taking time for an AMA.
What are the biggest challenges for you as a large routing node operator?
What are the biggest operational challenges for Cash App running a group of lightning nodes?
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
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Thank you for your insight.
Rolling up through Block as a public company, are you all subject to compliance for understanding and reporting payment details and amounts (issues like AML)? Or audit requirements for 'material' capital deployment?
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yeah Block is subject to all the legal things
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