Most traditional startups get asked "What is your exit strategy?" meaning a Merger, Acquisition, or an IPO. Do you see these as the same for bitcoin and lightning startups? What exits are realistic for bitcoin startups?

A UPS is a more critical piece of hardware that will save you from 90% of the problems you'd encounter.

This is looking awesome!!

Who said we're good? 😈

Generally, we're into opt-in, not surveillance capitalism. The lightning network needs coordination for it to be efficient and that's something we can help with. We win when the lightning network grows. The more decentralized it is, the more coordinating it needs.

The UPS protects against rapid shutdowns that may corrupt the SD card or SSD. If the database gets corrupted, your records about what money is yours versus your channel partner's will be ruined and could lead to loss of funds.

Thank you for the kind words! Lightning is extremely open for innovators and builders. A big barrier in adoption of lightning is the UI/UX with tons of promising projects already in existence. Just by being a user and providing feedback provides tremendous value. With your experience in startups, you may be able to help others that won't be as prepared when speaking with VCs. Translating what bitcoiners are working on to traditional investors is a really hard task, but those that can recognize the scale of the opportunity in lightning will benefit tremendously.

Electric!

Speaking from personal experience: running a lightning node without a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) is reckless. Even in the US, the electrical grid is pretty unreliable when it comes to delicate hobbyist hardware. A UPS is cheap insurance when it comes to protecting your sats!

I'm jumping back into building Amboss! Thanks so much for the great questions; this was fun!

I play guitar and cello, take walks on trails, plan trips, and talk to strangers.

Thanks for the encouragement!!

Just being on Stacker.News is a great way to get exposure to how powerful lightning network is...we're paying each other to make great content over the internet, independent of where we are on the globe or what borders are between us. Borderless, frictionless commerce with next to zero fees is a real game changer.

For comparison, take a look at the fees that VISA charges its merchants (who pass it onto their customers). Looking through the table of fees to merchants, I don't see a single option that is less than $0.10 plus a percentage fee (0.05% - 3.15%). On the consumer side, this debt is charged an additional ~10-25% interest for those that carry a balance.

For a merchant, there is only a choice between three providers: VISA, MasterCard, American Express. On Lightning, there are 16,000 possible providers that are competing to process your transactions. Currently, there are 46 offers on Magma alone that can provide the same payment processing service at an average price of 2.27% APR.

Lightning is an open market, traditional payment methods are closed markets running an oligopoly.

Going from working for someone else to being almost entirely self-directed was both the scariest and most rewarding transition by far. While I still feel impostor syndrome, just completing often very dumb tasks to build a business is giving me way more confidence. I also feel much more aligned. While working for someone else, lightning was a distraction, but it was too important to ignore, so now I get to focus on it full time.

My life got turned completely upside-down, but I'm free to be nomadic while working harder than I've ever worked and feeling good about it. Also, explaining what I do for work to normal people is now a Herculean task.

Lightning Labs is doing really good things to help build the network. They're not even paying me to say this. I think building for apps enables the ecosystem to grow in a healthy way.

Exactly. I also import it into Bluewallet so I can have the nice UI for buying beers from Candle's lightning beer tap at lightning conferences :)

I've learned a lot!! Probably the biggest one is that the "inbound liquidity problem" isn't actually about liquidity being scarce. It's about how the network is communicating.

If liquidity was scarce, we'd see the yields from routing nodes explode higher. Instead, anyone that wants to get some inbound liquidity can quickly find someone that's selling it and buy a channel from them. With the network being so decentralized, the biggest needs are actually in coordination and communication.

Omg I use so many hahaha. For the most transactions, I probably use @lntxbot the most, but I really like bluewallet for when I'm out and about and Strike so I don't have to think about capital gains taxes in the US. I've used Zeus for when I need my node, but I will often switch to using Thunderhub via Tor mobile for the fully featured aspects.

Other wallets I use: Wallet of Satoshi Muun Phoenix (also good for out n about)

This is a really tough question. Our thinking is that this is user experience driven and by making liquidity as easy as possible to access (and access quickly) will be the biggest driver of marketshare. We also want to have the depth of liquidity and that's stemming from being interoperable across implementations.

There's a few things that we're optimizing for with Magma: Speed, User Experience, and Reliability. It may not the cheapest place to get liquidity or the most on-chain efficient, so users that want to optimize for those qualities will likely choose other options. But lightning network operator time is precious and probably the dominant cost of running a routing node.

While I'm at least a mostimalist if not a full-blown maximalist, I think people will want to see stablecoins on lightning, which essentially means a DEX based in bitcoin. The major driver in this will be the user experience. A key component in the user experience is how much prior knowledge is required and unfortunately that may mean that people will use fiat over the lightning network before they are comfortable with bitcoin itself.

Another driver is a mature market for the time-value of bitcoin. How much can people earn as yield by keeping their savings in bitcoin and using it on the lightning network? With negative interest rates in Europe and the developed world, I don't see people wanting to keep their funds in depreciating fiat assets with negative interest rates.

We're really interested in improving the liquidity tools available and collaborating with merchants and exchanges to design for their current and future needs.

Additionally, we're exploring what the data market will look like. Since lightning is private by design and we're all so curious what's happening on it, what will the effect be of sharing information and how will the incentives evolve?

We're trying out lots of different avenues since lightning has so much potential and just trying not to duplicate the efforts of other builders in the space.