The Kevin Rooke Show

Danny Diekroeger - 00:00:00:

I think the first thing that I really noticed at Cash App is there's this culture of obsession about the customers. It's not like, how can we make money? It's how can we give our customers a better experience. For us we have three channel partners, and so it's a bit harder to have a higher success rate when you only know essentially those three channel balances. And then you have to sort of probe the network to figure out high success paths. Otherwise we sent out the transaction. There was a huge spike in the Mempool, and these transactions were unconfirmed for like, two days. And it's like, oh, no. And you can just open massive channels to loop. And this is the first thing I did when I started out. I was like, oh my God, this is great. I can open all these channels to loop. This node has been around for two years. It has 50 bitcoin in capacity and has a good reputation. I think people are going to loan that node money. I did make a node for fun that was just one bitcoin, and it was making like it made like $20 a day for a little bit.

Kevin Rooke - 00:01:02:

Danny Diekroeger is a bitcoin software engineer at Cash App and the operator of one of the world's largest Lightning Network nodes. In our discussion, Danny explained how Cash App likes to think about adding new features for customers. We talked specifically about their bitcoin and Lightning integrations and some of the challenges that have come up trying to operate these features at the scale of Cash App. And we also got into Spirals Lightning Development Kit and Danny's personal node called Deezy, and some of his strategies for becoming a successful Lightning node operator. I've also added Danny to today's show splits. So if you enjoy the show and if you learn something new, the best way you can support Danny and myself is by sending in sats over the Lightning Network, sending some comments, send in some boosts. My favorite Podcasting 2.0 app to use is Fountain, but there are lots of them. Your choice. Before we get into today's episode, just a quick shout out. This episode is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Zebedee, and Zebedee is your portal into the world of bitcoin gaming. We'll have more from Voltage and Zebedee later in the show. Danny, welcome to the show. I am so excited to talk about Cash App, about Lightning, about block as a business, your Lightning node. We've got a lot to cover today, but let's start with an introduction. Tell listeners a little bit more about your background in bitcoin, how you decided to work at Cash App, and why you're now deciding to run a Lightning node yourself.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:02:45:

Sure, yeah. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Kevin, big fan of your podcast. So excited to be here. Yeah, I guess my Bitcoin journey started several years ago when my baseball career ended. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next and that was like 2017 when things were going pretty wild and all of crypto back when I didn't really know much better. And yeah, I guess I had a background in software engineering, like studying that in school so that I was able to get a job at BitGo. Was there for about a year and a half working on wallet software there. And then ultimately I saw this. I was like a big fan of Cash App’s products and the fact that they were bitcoin only. So that really attracted me to want to check it out and just applied to the bitcoin team like two and a half years ago and got the role. And since then you had just been a Cash App working on started off working on the hot wallets, withdrawn deposit, basically, like helping scale that infrastructure. And then for the last year and year and a half been working on the Lightning integration there and then obviously. I just think Lightning is the most exciting technology to work on right now. And so just diving into that at Cash App has been amazing. And then obviously trying to do some it's my personal node as well. So having a lot of fun with a big routing node and trying to make it do well.

Kevin Rooke - 00:04:31:

Love it. So when you showed up to Cash App, had they launched their Bitcoin integration yet?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:04:38:

Yeah, they had launched Bitcoin, buy, sells, send, received, I think like early 2018 maybe. And I showed up in 2020. So it was well, they had done a ton of work. It was working pretty well. I think when I came it was more just like, okay, let's clean up the backend infrastructure, make things more efficient, build a little more, bring a little more things in house. So kind of building out hot wallets from scratch internally was one of the big things that I came to start.

Kevin Rooke - 00:05:18:

And then so you were there for that decision to decide to integrate Lightning. Maybe that's a good starting point for the conversation. I really want to understand more about how Cash App and how Block think about adding new features. Like, what are the frameworks you guys are using to decide yes, it's a good idea to integrate Bitcoin now. Yes, it's a good idea to integrate Lightning now. What about future features? Like, you know, when you get feature requests from people on Twitter, how do you decide whether or not that is a good thing to integrate now or put it on the back burner maybe later? Or just know we're not going to do that at all?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:06:03:

Yeah, I can tell from my perspective. I think the first thing that I really noticed at Cash App is there's a culture of obsession about the customers and how can we help our customers? And that was just eye opening to see like, every meeting and presentation of things is just a spoken it's not like, how can we make money? It's how can we give our customers a better experience? Give them something, give them value. And so I think that's where it all starts for Cash App, like, just non bitcoin in general and how they were able to build such an incredible product. And then in terms of bitcoin, definitely the culture is set from the top with Jack being just like a very principled bitcoiner. And so I think one of the things that the Cash App has decided is to take these long term principled risks, especially around bitcoin, to where they're willing to let us push what we think is best for Bitcoin because we ultimately think what's best for Bitcoin will be best for the company and the customers. And so that is just a cool place to be, where they're like, yeah, we want to be the first ones to do Lightning and we're the first public company to do that. It's definitely balancing of what's best for the customer, but also we believe Bitcoin is so important to do it and not just do it, but do it right. It's cool to be a part of and just there's so many great people in all parts of the company in terms of product decisions on what to do next. And, yeah, there's a lot of great people thinking about this stuff.

Kevin Rooke - 00:07:54:

Yeah. So was that Lightning decision more geared towards what's best for Bitcoin or was it more geared towards what's best for customers? Because I think at the time and still today, Lightning is primarily a bitcoin or focused idea. It really doesn't resonate with a lot of people who are not in the bitcoin space yet. So I wonder if what is that draw for? What did you guys see on the customer side that Lightning could enable today and into the future?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:08:29:

Yeah, so I think it's a bit of both. So one thing that we did notice is there were a lot of small on chain withdrawals coming from our app, which is not ideal. You'd have people because you're creating all these small UTXOs, which is not good for the chain, exploding the chain and everything. We did notice that a lot of people I think from a broader customer perspective, a lot of people just didn't really know about Lightning. So it's not like it was strongly demanded, definitely was on Twitter with, like, the bitcoiners who. But part of it is just we believe in the Lightning Network and we want it to push the envelope and essentially become experts earlier than most and just fight to release it. That was actually an interesting I actually felt like we were a little late because there were other places doing Lightning well before us, but it was a challenge as a big company that is public that has like a very robust compliance department. Lightning is just a new thing and so there is a lot of challenges there and we had some great people working on how do we do this and do it confidently from a compliance perspective, which is not something I have to think about as an engineer, but there's a whole compliance department that is trying to make it work with the regulators and all that stuff.

Kevin Rooke - 00:10:13:

Yeah. Can you speak to some of those challenges then? It's one thing for public companies, I think this is something that Michael Saylor talked about and you guys may have talked about this as well, like the challenge for public companies to buy Bitcoin and to be able to go through that compliance process. If you're a large company, there's just a bunch of hoops you got to jump through. What about then taking the next level and integrating Bitcoin payments into your app and then another level integrating Lightning which is much more private and it's another level of complexity and uncertainty for compliance officers. What were those challenges like over the last few years?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:10:56:

[REDACTED]

Kevin Rooke - 00:13:42:

I want to also explore we see these challenges now of adopting a new technology from the regulatory side or the compliance side. What are the challenges in getting users to use these products like Lightning, I imagine for a lot of Cash App users it's there, but are they using it today? I'd love to learn more about what usage has been like. Are there any particular use cases you've noticed people are adopting it for? What's the status of that today?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:14:15:

Yeah, so people are using it definitely. There's definitely a chicken and egg type of thing where someone's got to support it, then both sides got to support it and it sort of got to come up like that. Challenges is around user experience. So obviously you want your Lightning payment to go through instantly. Frankly, I don't think our performance has been up to the standard that I was hoping for. Like we're always trying to make it better because sometimes we'll have payments that on Lightning they can get stuck, you can send it out and then one of the intermediate node sort of like goes offline and you're just kind of waiting to hear back on what happened and might have force closed the channel. And so it's kind of like how can we iron out the UX from these technical problems? And also another challenge is that one of the restrictions that we have is the way our compliance process has been is we're restricted into who we can open channels with. So it's a lot easier to have snappy high success payments if you can open 100 channels to 100 different peers. And you see like, for example, Kraken, they've been able to open channels with a ton of people and for us we have three channel partners and so it's a bit harder to have a higher success rate when you only know essentially those three channel balances and then you have to sort of probe the network to figure out high success paths otherwise. So we're working on trying to expand our regulatory story so that we can open channels with more counterparties so we can increase our success rate and then sorry, the other part of this quest, the first part was challenges around experience. Oh yeah. And what our customers doing with it. I can't say too much about the data that I see. What our customers are doing, it's diverse, it's random stuff. Also we see a lot of payments going to other API providers and so we don't know what necessarily is going on there. A lot of payments to like yeah, it seems like there's been some kind of an explosion of several Lightning merchant API providers, if that makes sense. And we see a lot to those. And then we don't know. We're not sure what the merchant is. We just know it's going to this API provider, essentially.

Kevin Rooke - 00:17:13:

Right, okay. So now I'm not sure what kind of information you're allowed to reveal here. If there's too much, that's fine, but I want to get your sense for whether or not the adoption to date has exceeded or underwhelmed your expectations. You don't have to give a number if you can't, if user numbers and all that is kind of confidential. But what's your sentiment on, like, you watch this Lightning project go from an idea to now being implemented to date? Has it exceeded or fallen short of your expectations?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:17:51:

[REDACTED]

Kevin Rooke - 00:19:10:

Yeah. So in terms of making that customer experience more fluid and snappy for the end user, you mentioned you only have three partners that you have connected to your Node right now. Is this like a compliance related thing? Like, you have the KYC, these particular partners and then know that any payment going through them is okay and whatever happens beyond that is not your issue. Is that kind of the idea there?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:19:37:

Yeah. The part that our compliance team wanted is they want us to peer directly with other regulated US based companies, essentially. And there's a process that the team is working on so they can get comfortable with each new company we onboard. And so far there have been three companies that you've all probably know well, and we're working on having like a more hopefully we can eventually just get rid of this whole we can just open channels with anybody. That's the goal. I think we're just taking baby steps with I mean, if it were up to me, we would just go crazy. It's just I got to work within the framework of the big companies.

Kevin Rooke - 00:20:30:

Yeah, that makes sense. And I've been watching your own node pick up a lot of channels recently, but we'll get into that later on in the show. So I guess to finish off this segment on the kind of user experience of Lightning on Cash App, how do you rate the reliability today of making a Lightning payment on Cash App? And I guess because you're a consumer facing app and because you have tens of millions of users, the standard of excellence has to be pretty high, right? People come to Cash App expecting like a pretty seamless experience. What's your sentiment on how that Lightning experience has evolved? And how far away are you from getting to the point where with certainty, a user can basically say, hey, if I'm going to send this payment, it's going to go through and I know it, right?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:21:23:

Yeah, I think we still have work to do. Even just in the last we go through cycles where we have super high success rate for two weeks and then kind of something happens sometimes. We saw actually it was pretty interesting. We saw at one point the guy zero fee routing when his node went offline. So he had an LND node and he was a huge hub. And then at one point he switched to Core Lightning, took down his entire node, built it back up when he went offline. There was like a couple of days where payment success rate definitely dropped as the algorithm had to adjust. And I don't know how much that was actually him. But also with us, sorry, we have a little more like if you use the LND path finding or the Correlating pathfinding, they're pretty good, they work pretty well. We're working with LDK, which is another thing we can get into, but we have more kind of finer grained controls over how LDK works. And they've implemented a fantastic algorithm that is like the Probabilistic score, which is kind of a state of the art thing. And as the Cash App team, we're just still learning like, how to tinker with this algorithm correctly. And so that's one of the things I've really been focused on, is what do we wait, we're willing probably to overpay a bit to have higher success rate? How do we balance that? And then what parameters can we set in this path finding algorithm to optimize? Whatever we're optimizing for right now, it's like we're going to pay a little extra to take fewer hops to make sure we can get a higher reliability. But it's super interesting to work with LDK and the flexibility there of how we can customize the pathfinding algorithm.

Kevin Rooke - 00:23:28:

Yeah, it's very cool. I want to get into LDK in a second. But maybe just to give people a perspective because I think you have a very interesting one working at Cash App and running one of the largest node on the Lightning Network, what's your sentiment for what percentage of payments happening on Lightning go through successfully today? If you had to put that to a number, are we talking like above 50%? Are we talking above 70%? What's your sentiment?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:24:00:

So I think it really depends because I would say from like sending from, I would guess if you're on Cash, I don't think we at Cash App have been as good as River or a Kraken or Wallet of Satoshi, some of these other big, I don't think we've been as good. I think eventually we're closer to getting there, but I think sending from some of these bigger, well connected nodes that have been doing it for a while, I think we're in the high 90% when you're going to another normal destination. But now the question is, are you sending it to your node that has no liquidity that's going to be 0%? So I think for normal users it's high 90s, like 98%, 99%. But then the question is, okay, if you're doing other types of things, like, for example, in my node, when I'm doing certain rebalancing, I might have a 10% success rate, but that's okay because I'm just like aggressively looking for these obscure paths to rebalance my liquidity in like super illiquid paths. And so in that case, you're expecting a low success rate, but it's also not the user. You don't care about a high success rate, you want the cheapest path for example. From a broader user perspective. Seems pretty good to me. High 90%, like 96%, 98% for normal payments?

Kevin Rooke - 00:25:43:

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So normal payments, you're getting pretty close to like perfect and then it's the obscure rebalancing stuff that is you kind of have to assume some of these are going to fail. Or again, if you're going to a node with no liquidity, of course it's going to fail and that may be dragging down the overall average. Is that fair to say?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:26:03:

Yeah, there's definitely a ton of failed payments, but part of that is because they're specifically looking for super low fee paths that are like way out there and you send it with a low probability of success expectation.

Kevin Rooke - 00:26:21:

Right, that makes sense. Okay, so I want to dig into Cash App more broadly and the infrastructure you guys have deployed to build on Bitcoin and Lightning at scale. Right? Because the last number I saw for Cash App users, tens of millions of users, I think I saw a 70 million number estimate from somewhere. You got a lot of users and you had, I think, a $10 billion volume in terms of Bitcoin sales on Cash App in 2021. So I want to understand, you guys are probably the company that is exploring Bitcoin and Lightning at the highest scale today. So I want to understand what are the technical challenges you guys are facing to deploy these services at scale and maintain them and make sure they're consistently giving users a great experience. You know, whether or not chain fees spike or whether or not someone's Lightning, though, goes down. What are you guys using today to make sure that experience is always top notch?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:27:24:

[REDACTED]

Kevin Rooke - 00:29:46:

Yeah, let's do it.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:29:48:

Okay. Yeah. So this was spring 2021. So last year, remember when China banned bitcoin miners and we visually saw in the hash rate take this massive drop off in a huge which slowed down block production temporarily before because the difficulty adjustment takes a couple of weeks, two weeks to adjust. But we had a huge spike in fees. And so at this point, Cash App was subsidizing bitcoin withdrawal on chain withdrawal fees. So it was free for customers to withdraw and they would get cash out, would just pay it and we'd pay for the next block. And all of a sudden these fees just spiked. And we knew eventually we're gonna to have to start charging for these on chain fees. And so we had some contingency plans when this fee spike became unbearable. But when this happened very quickly to where all of a sudden it was like a companywide, okay, we need to change this now. So it's like, okay, we drop the first thing is we dropped the block target. So instead of going for next block, you pay the high speed. It was like, okay, we're going to go for a six hour target. So that bought us a little bit of time. But then it was like, okay, we need to kind of scramble to some people are willing to pay for high speed next block. So we implemented, we were able to quickly implement like charging the customer a fee depending on what urgency they want. So you can pay for the fastest one or you can get it free, but it'll take 24 hours. But then the question is, okay, how do you hit your block targets? And that's the whole thing that I spend a ton of time on, like fee estimation, right? Because you have fee estimation is a whole interesting thing. I think for the Bitcoin Core fee estimation, they look at the last X number of blocks, see what the average fee was and do some calculation on that. Actually, the better fee estimations, they look at the velocity of the Mempool and how fast it's growing and you can do some calculations as to what fee to predict. But anyway, so you can estimate a fee and send off a transaction, but then if if you get a bunch of new transactions into the Mempool, they can crowd out the one you sent. And you may have paid a high fee hoping for the next block, but now all these new ones came in and outbid you and your transactions kind of stuck. Ultimately the solution is child pays for parent or replaced by fee RBF, which are just two native things in the protocol where you actually can just set a lower fee and then fee bump it as needed so you don't get stuck anymore. So that's one of the things that I spend a lot of time working on at Cash App is we used to just send the transaction and let it ride, but you get these things where we had some issues where customers we set up the transaction. There was a huge spike in the Mempool and these transactions were unconfirmed for like two days and it was like, oh no. And so first it was just a manual thing. You can manually spend one of the change outputs with a super high fee so that it pays for the bigger one sets child pays per parent. So we implemented that first. Manually and then a more automated thing, we had to change up our coin selection as well. So there's a popular type of coin selection called branch inbound where it optimizes for not creating a change output. So it tries to pick like the perfect combination of inputs so that if your withdrawal has 100 outputs in it, it can do them all perfectly with no change output. The problem with that is if you don't have a change output, you can't bump the fee of that thing. So we reworked some of that logic so that we had like a good size change output to then automatically bump the fee if we need to. And so that was a super interesting thing like implementing basically we use a combination now if child pays for parent and replaced by fee to ensure that now okay, when withdrawal comes out, we'll send it at the lowest possible fee right now. And then we know we're going to hit the target of either like a next block because we can always look at the Mempool and make sure we're bumping high enough to get into the next block. Or we do like the twelve hour target. I think it's like four or 6 hours is the second tier and then the 24 hours. And so now because we are able to just bump the fee as needed, we always hit our withdrawal targets and haven't really had problems since. Like that used to be 100% of my work was like fighting these fires on these on chain withdrawals and then finally we were able to get out this automated fee bumping thing that then we were able to be like, okay, this works, this is scaling. Even with the Mempool spikes, now we can focus on Lightning.

Kevin Rooke - 00:35:34:

Yeah, it was a rough couple of weeks and maybe even a couple of months for a lot of people in Bitcoin when the Chinese miners went offline there. But it's cool to see that taking minors offline and having this really urgent need for Bitcoin community to come together and come up up with solutions has led to these kinds of scaling solutions. And it happens every time price goes down, the same thing kind of happens where you can have like the people holding on are hardened a little bit. They're now almost immune to these price falls and they recognize volatility is a thing and they know how to hold their coins. And then when you have disruptions, you mentioned zero fee routing going down or Chinese miners going offline, like these kind of disruptions as well. It feels like they harden the infrastructure that supports Bitcoin and the infrastructure that allows people all over the world to participate in it. So that's very cool to see. I want to get into LDK now and I believe Cash App you guys are running on LDK, is that correct? I imagine that's the case, yes. Got it. Now I've had people from Lightning labs on the show. I've had Core Lightning on the show. I want to hear the LDK pitch. I want to know why LDK is the implementation that a node operator should be using on Lightning and what specifically you guys get out of LDK that you wouldn't get on LND or on Core Lightning.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:37:13:

Yeah, this is an interesting sort of thing we went through because it was like, hey, we're ready to do Lightning. What are we going to use? To me, the way I see it is that we have between LND, Core Lightning, Eclair. Those were the three that we were looking at at first, and all three of those are great. We could have picked any one of those and I think we would have done great. I actually think we probably would have been able to launch faster with any of those. We chose to go with LDK for a few reasons. One. This was developed by Square Crypto, now called Spiral. The team with Steasley, Macarolo, Jeff, Val, everyone. They've been working on this for years. And so it was this nice partnership to where we knew that we can work directly with them every day. They're in the same slack as us. It's an internally built tool. We know they're like in to cater exactly to everything we need. And it's kind of like a tit for tat. We were able to help give them feedback as they're coming building this library, and they were able to build the features we need as we go. I don't think there's a best implementation because it all depends what you're trying to do. For my personal node, I use LND, and for me, I chose that because it's a fully packaged node out of the box. It has a fantastic set of nice libraries around it, like Alex Bosworth's LN service, the Boss Tool, which I can track all the routing. I mean, it's just a phenomenal thing for, like, a node operator. And the advantages around LDK is that the difference is it doesn't come really as a fully packaged node. It comes as like a library that has a set of tools in it. And so one of the things is, at Cash App, one of the advantages we have is, as I mentioned before, we have all this infrastructure that's been built over years by the Cash App teams. It's like our Kubernetes deployment with automated logging and restarts, and you can scale more pods as needed. And with LDK, we could just have this little library, and we just include it right into the code that we're already writing. And this gives us such great flexibility because it can be built right into these services that we're comfortable writing code in already. So, for example, some things that we were able to do right away with LDK is we have more than one node, we have two nodes, and we're able to expand that to three, four, five, as many as we want and we're going to easily be able to have no downtime when we deploy new versions or updates or all that stuff. One of the problems if you run like a single, like a Core Lightning or LND node is if you're like changing a config or if you're changing something. But a lot of times you just have to restart the node. So you take it offline and you're offline. Nobody can pay and you bring it back online. Now that said, there are efforts and they're doing a great job of making it so you can have like two LND nodes with the multiplexer. And so they're solving this problem as well. It's going to work great the way they're doing it as well. But we just kind of like that LDK fits right into the infrastructure we already have. Yeah, that's kind of the big thing is it's included as just like a library, so now we're writing our own code within there. We're able to do different types of things like customize a little more customization in the path finding. Like, for example, one thing we have to do is there's like sanctions controls around which nodes we can route through and so it's super easy to customize the path finding to avoid certain nodes if we wanted to, things like that. Honestly, there's a lot of great ways we could have done this. I'm a huge fan of LND. For my personal node, I played around with Core Lightning too, and it seems great. And looking at Claire and how they have scaled that, I'm super interested as well and I want to try to run one of those. So I think as a developer, you have a ton of great options.

Kevin Rooke - 00:42:37:

I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard for Lightning Network infrastructure, creating layer two applications and services on top of bitcoin starts with Voltage, where you can spin up node, get access to liquidity, optimize your node and much more. Voltage is leading the way as the next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. And if you want to get a free trial and start using Voltage today, you can do so at Voltage Cloud. Now, is that a path you think other companies that integrate Lightning will take? Where they decide, I'm going to build my own Lightning implementation because I have a specific set of needs that I want to make sure I catered to? Or do you think now we have four now big Lightning implementations? Maybe some others that I'm not aware of. Is this now at a stage where companies can just pick from the existing ones and kind of have all their needs met?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:43:40:

I think companies right now, like big companies, Cash App style, custodial big node. Because one of the disadvantages LDK is it's been a bit slower to get going just because it's newer and so there's a little more hiccups and you know there's bindings. To get the job, we'll use Java and so we're using the Java bindings and there's been some bugs there so it's been a bit slower to get there. But I think that a lot of big companies are probably going to pick LND and have a fantastic time. Or you know Core Lightning. I think it's when you get into these more customized use cases where, for example, the non custodial mobile I think is a very interesting use case, which I think you're going to start to see more people using the LDK because you can sort of pick and choose what you want to customize. I know, for example, there's the John Cantrell. The Sensei is a super cool project utilizing LDK. I know there are talks with the Fete Mint how they might use some. For example, they're going to have an interesting thing where the mobile client might do the pathfinding and so they might want the LDK pathfinding algorithm in there and just that or something like that. So I think as we start seeing these more diverse use cases is when you'll start to see I think that's where LDK really thrives because of the flexibility. Whereas I think a lot of just like big custodial node, you can kind of just pick an existing implementation and run with it.

Kevin Rooke - 00:45:33:

Right now, one thing I want to bring up is I know you guys are not publicly listed as Cash App for your Lightning node or for your Lightning nodes. I think you kind of alluded to one of the reasons, I guess, why that is the case, having just the three partners right now. Can you talk about the strategy and maybe there's more that I'm not familiar with, but why take the approach of kind of like, is there a benefit to not showing your node publicly as a big business? Or is this something that over time Cash App will have a node alias that anyone can look up on Amboss or any of the other explorers?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:46:18:

[REDACTED]

Kevin Rooke - 00:48:08:

Does that make sense? Yeah, I want to jump to Block as a business and knowing you guys went through this kind of restructuring, I guess, of the business recently, where now you have Block and then you have projects beneath it, TBD, Spiral, you got Square, Cash App, things like that, how does that structure benefit the business as a whole? And then specifically on your team, are you seeing any benefits from the change in structure there?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:48:42:

Yeah, so it's interesting and I think as a company we're trying to work it out and figure out how it's going to work because at first it was just basically the Cash App team, kind of like my team. We were the Bitcoin team within All Square, but now there's all these different parts and initiatives and groups and there's All TDB, basically the company's name, Block, and it's the restructure. And so we're it's trying to figure out, okay, now if other parts of the company you want to do Lightning, how should we work with them? There's like different infrastructure, it's almost like sort of this distributed layout now and it's a challenge for us to figure out how we're going to interoperate, help each other out, use the existing stuff we've already done, or maybe not, and have different types of initiatives at this point. Now there's more Bitcoin stuff going on at Block that I am keeping you up with. For example, the hardware wallet is a super cool project and they're kind of just doing their thing and so we're all connected to chat. But what's cool to see is this sort of like bitcoin is having roots in all parts of the company and it's kind of just growing in this sort of natural way and it's sort of a challenge for us to kind of make sense of it all work together. But yeah, I'm a big fan of just the overall initiative and there's a lot of Bitcoiners within the company, different parts of the company that want to bring Bitcoin to more forefronts, to more parts of the company, which hopefully we'll start seeing more of.

Kevin Rooke - 00:50:32:

Very cool. I do want to highlight this Bitcoin wallet. I know you're not specifically working on the hardware Wallet team, but I did see a photo from Jesse who I believe is on, on Block's bitcoin hardware team. I think this might have been back in April and it was showing off these, like, hexagon disks kind of, and they were kind of like some had different little textures and there was a little button on it people could be able to find. I'm sure people can find it on Twitter under Jesse's name, but I want to get an idea for what these discs were. There was speculation. These are wallet prototypes. Is that true? Are you allowed to elaborate more on this? I would love to learn more about the status of that project.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:51:22:

Honestly, I probably know as much as you about the status. I'm not working on it. And I know that we have a fantastic team focused on it. And I know the initiative is like hardware wallet, but just reimagined and done in a way that kind of is more just accessible to non Bitcoiners. And essentially and I honestly don't even know enough to give too much detail. And if I did, I probably couldn't give too much detail. But yeah, I think that's just one of the broader things that Cash App and the rest of Block focuses on is like, how can we make this more accessible to everybody? And that comes down to, like, you see it in the hardware project, but also just things for us. Like when you try to send to a Bitcoin address and you see this weird address, like, we have, our design team is, like, super good at lookin. That's kind of uncomfortable for, like, a normal person. So, like, I think we talked about this at Bitcoin 2022, the unified QR code. Doing more of that. It's more of a comfortable thing. I think Cash chef and Block do a great job but like, reimagining design to be simplified. But yeah, in terms of the hardware wallet, I don't really know too much. I can't really say too much about it.

Kevin Rooke - 00:53:02:

Fair enough. I have to ask very curious about that one and excited to see it roll out. But in the same vein of talking about making it easier for people to get on boarded to Bitcoin, you did a Bitcoin integration, you did a Lightning integration working on a wallet. What are the next initiatives that you guys are starting to think about? The unsolved problems that and you mentioned the Bitcoin addresses a little bit. What other unsolved problems do you think you guys are going to be focused on next as you progress and as you roll out new features?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:53:47:

We want to bring Bitcoin to the world in a way that is very accessible and hopefully just more of that. Yeah, I don't know what I cannot talk about that we're actually doing, unfortunately.

Kevin Rooke - 00:54:04:

Fair enough.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:54:06:

I can ask you what, what do you think is next for Block?

Kevin Rooke - 00:54:11:

Oh, what do I think is next for Block? I'd love to see an LN-URL integration. Like, the ability to log in with Lightning small like Lightning upgrade, I guess. I've noticed that start to take off in a number of Lightning apps and I think it's going to be really useful. Right now it's mostly just LN-URL off is just the login with Lightning. But would love to also find a way for if I have a Lightning wallet and I sign up for. Let's say. Stacker News. I love to be able to connect that wallet and then instantly use that balance across the different apps that I'm connected to and so kind of giving each app permissions into my wallet that I say it can access.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:55:03:

You would do that with your Cash App, Lightning, your Cash App bitcoin wallet, you're saying? Or you're saying doing it currently with LN, you are now enabled wallet you currently have.

Kevin Rooke - 00:55:17:

So right now, yeah, you can log in only. So LN-URL Off is just login with Lightning, but I could use, let's say Breez and I could log in with Lightning, but my balance then on Stacker News or whatever app I just logged into is still zero. I want the funds that I had put on Breez or on Cash App or whatever app. I want those funds to then be instantly accessible on the new app that I'm using. And again, I don't even know if this is possible, but I think that would be a really cool you know user experience feature.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:55:55:

Yeah. You have some allowance or basically a spending limit that can be automatically deducted, sort of, right? Yeah, yeah, that'd be super cool. The LN-URL is a very interesting protocol. We could get into that discussion too about the Lightning address and how that works with both twelve aspirations as well. Which has been an interesting thing because at Cash App we aren't doing any LN-URL stuff yet and part of that but I do think there's a place I think we should start to because there's some cool parts of LN URL that would be nice to pick up on.

Kevin Rooke - 00:56:50:

Yeah.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:56:51:

But we're also kind of trying to buy time because we sort of want both twelve to catch on and have that be as the standard for like a single address type of thing. But that's kind of an interesting but they also can both sort of work together, so it's kind of a nuanced interesting thing going on.

Kevin Rooke - 00:57:13:

Yeah, something like Lightning addresses would be really cool as well because you guys have, you guys have Cash tags, right?

Danny Diekroeger - 00:57:22:

Exactly. Yeah.

Kevin Rooke - 00:57:23:

And that makes so much sense, is unique to your platform. So I guess like proprietary, and but it limits the interoperability. Right. I can't request money from someone else if I have Cash tag and they're in a different part of the world or vice versa. But with a Lightning address, you get that full interoperability. Every username could have like every user on Cash App could have their Lightning address tied to their cache tag and just open up another avenue for sending and receiving.

Danny Diekroeger - 00:57:59:

It's super cool. The one hesitation around the Lightning address is just that it requires like you know exposing an IP address essentially of you. Well, if you're using Cash App, it's provided by Cash App, so it's fine. I think the one thing that because we've thought about this a lot between the Square Crypto Spiral Team and the Cash App in, the one thing we are hesitant about is that if like a Lightning, Lightning addresses become what everyone's using now all of a sudden. And if there's not the incentive to basically if everyone starts using Lightning addresses, what happens to the person who really cares about privacy? And they have their own custodial sorry, they have their own Lightning node and they're trying to protect their privacy and now they have to expose an IP address to receive funds the way everyone wants to be able to send them funds. That is the one hesitation now. I think there's ways that can be get around like maybe some private VPN type of stuff. But part of what sort of the team around us has decided is that we want the BOLT Twelve to sort of take off as that one address that you post because then the communication for the invoice can happen over the tor, over the encrypted, or Lightning not gossip the messages, which be a privacy gain. But there is just an interesting but also like LN-URL and Full Twelve can work together. And it's an interesting thing. I think it's a good discussion to have as well.

Kevin Rooke - 01:00:14:

Yeah, it's an interesting trade off and to be honest, some of the technical details or all of the technical details go over my head a little bit. But I'm excited about what's going to come from this because I'd rather have these two competing standards working on providing a better solution than no standards or just one. I think it's a good idea that there are multiple ways we're trying to approach this problem and figure out what the market decides over time.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:00:45:

Yeah. LN-URL I mean, it solves a problem. It works great. It's very practical, it's super cool.

Kevin Rooke - 01:00:58:

I want to get into your node specifically. You've got a pretty serious Lightning node. Again, I believe, top 20 on the Lightning Network in terms of capacity and channels before we get into the operations of it. What made you decide you wanted to run a personal node?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:01:23:

I wanted to get my hands dirty and learn. And I just think Lightning is obviously it's growing. I think it's going to keep growing at a rapid pace. And I mostly just want to learn and make some income as well from the fees and everything, see if I can get it profitable, try to learn. What do other node providers need, what do merchants need? Mostly I'm just trying to learn.

Kevin Rooke - 01:01:57:

Right, very cool. Now you have a node and then you have a website connected to your node. I believe it's Deezy.io and you have a swap service on there. Talk to me more about that and how that works.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:02:13:

Yeah, for sure. Okay, actually I can go through my journey as a node and then it will bring to the swap service. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so you start running a node, and the first thing you sort of realize is what you can do is maybe you open a channel to Kraken and you have a Kraken account. And then you're like, okay, nothing is happening yet. All the sats are on my side. And you're like, okay, we need to balance channel. So you go deposit some Lightning onto Kraken and now maybe you've done that. Now you have a balanced channel with Kraken, but then you don't have any other channels, so nothing happens. Then what you realize is you can open the channel to loop. And now loop is the service run by Lightning Labs where people use it to loop out, which allows essentially it's a way of sending Lightning to push capacity that way, so then you can receive it and then you get funds on chain. And loop is the most popular thing. It's like a submarine swap. So it's a trustless exchange of Lightning bitcoin for on chain coins. And so many people use loop all the time. What you realize is you can open a channel to loop and boom, it just gets drained and people pay you fees and everything's great, and you can just open massive channels to loop. And this is the first thing I did when I started. I was like, oh my god, this is great. I can open all these channels to loop. I'm going to undercut everyone else's fees because everyone charges high fees to loop. But you can undercut them and you get all this revenue, revenue, revenue. But then what you realize, what happens is all your inbound capacity, it gets drained and all your sats are on loop side. And then loop closes the channel because loop needs to harvest those funds, they're on chain funds to do their service. And so basically, you generate all this revenue from the routing loop. But then you're left with a node that has no inbound capacity anywhere. And what you realize is you probably spent more acquiring the inbound capacity in the first place. Then you made routing towards loop. So you've drained because to get inbound capacity, it costs money. You have to buy a channel on Amboss Magma, you have to buy a channel from LNBig, you might have to send to an exchange and withdraw, which incurs some fees. And so what you sort of realize is you can set low fees to loop, get a ton of volume, but you're selling off your inbound liquidity for too low a price. So then it's like, okay, so now raise your fees to loop, start opening more channels. You can start trying to rebalance certain things, but anyway, what it got me realizing is that there's like having okay, so that was the first sort of learning is like the difference between a sync node, which is loop, which is things are always flowing in and nothing really comes out that's a sync. And then there's source nodes where like Cash App is a great well, you can't connect to Cash App nodes, but Cash App is a great source node because it's mostly, almost all sending. So they open new channels and they send funds out. And so you want to be able to have inbound capacity from Cash App if you could, because they're going to provide you with this flow of inbound. So the difference between syncs and sources and I guess where I'm going with this is that's some of my early learnings but then what I realized is liquidity operations are super valuable because actually you can see a Cash App that there were certain merchants that get pretty good volume and then all of a sudden every payment is failing to them for a stretch of like an hour. And then it comes back and it starts working. And what we can see happen is that merchant, they ran out of inbound capacity. So a ton of these merchants, they have this problem where they mostly receive over Lightning, and then they do payouts on chain or something. And so they constantly have to manage their inbound capacity. So that's where a lot of them use loop. The problem with loop is it's like, it's kind of expensive is one thing. It really only works nicely with LND because you have to run like the loop daemon. They don't have a nice restful API. And so I was like, I think I'm just going to do my own swap service. And the other thing with loop, they do submarine swaps, which are trustless and super cool, but it's two on chain transactions and you have to wait a block confirmation before it can go through. So it's like kind of the slow process. You're not sure if it's going to go through or not. And so one of the things I was like, I'm going to do a different type of swap service that's going to be faster, hopefully less expensive, and only one on chain transaction, but it has a different trust model. So the way my swap service works is you request to do a swap, which is you're going to send me Lightning and I'm going to send you on chain. When you request a swap, I give you an invoice. And in that invoice is a message that says the Deezy node will pay X satoshis to Y on chain address at sats per byte. And so now you have this signed commitment, a verbal agreement that I'm going to pay this on chain if you pay the invoice. And so then you can pay the invoice. And once you pay the invoice, you get. The pre image and so that pre image is proof of payment. So essentially there's this trusted model where you can send me Lightning, I'll send you on chain and if I ever don't send anybody on chain they can go to the world with this invoice and the pre image say look, I have proof, I paid this invoice and the Deezy node did not fulfill the request. Like shame banish him. Like my Twitter account tanks, my business is over. And so it's a different trust model. So it requires more trust but the trade off is that it can go through instantly. So you can instantly make that payment. And it's an easy API, it's a very simple just like one API call. And I've seen some cool adoption people built into the Lightning TX bot by Fiatjaf is working on.

Kevin Rooke - 01:09:07:

Yeah.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:09:11:

Yeah, I think it solves a need where people are willing. One of the things I find interesting with Bitcoin and Lightning in general is that we have a wide selection of trust models and you can do full custodial or sorry. Noncustodial like hardware. Wallet. Tour. All this or you can do custody on an exchange in the same way you can do a submarine swap for your liquidity stuff or you can do this like semi trusted but easier and faster solution. And so I think what my Soft servers provides is like a very simple, fast semi trusted solution that I think people like.

Kevin Rooke - 01:09:50:

Yeah, that's very cool. And this is kind of a reputation based system now, right? Do you think this is going to become more common? I know Amboss has reputation scores on their liquidity marketplace. Is this something that's going to become more common where node operators. All node operators are kind of like ranked in terms of how well they hold up their ends of certain agreements or do you think we get to the point where the technology that all these nodes are running enables these kind of like submarine swaps in all sorts of instances where you don't have to trust anyone and you can kind of like know that this person is forced to uphold their end of an agreement.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:10:40:

Yeah, I think that there's going to continue to be a wide selection. I think that in the same way we've seen custody like custodial, wallets and exchanges tend to be the best customer experience. I think we'll continue to see that sort of trade off where it's like do you want full trustlessness? Great. You can do your submarine swaps and you might sacrifice some UX and experience for fully trustless. Whereas I think there are going to be reputational things and there already are already as the node operators, their nodes have reputations and it's like somebody is known for going offline or forced closing channels, you're just not going to open a channel with them or not have your business relied upon them. And I think that's naturally extending into like you said, the Magma reputation score. And I think we're going to get into also just like lending and borrowing to where a node is going to be able to say like, this node has been around for two years, it has 50 bitcoin and capacity and has a good reputation. I think people are going to loan that node money unsecured because they know that if they get some sort of signed agreement then it's like, well, this no is not going to give up their entire business to default on one loan. So I think adding a little bit of trust, selective trust, where people understand the risks they're taking, I think is going to continue to grow over Lightning because of these. Like each node has a very identifiable pub key, it has an identity.

Kevin Rooke - 01:12:38:

In this lending example, I could say, hey Danny, you know way more about routing than I do. Here's a million sats, take that, deploy it and then give me back a million in a year plus a prorated amount of the profits that you generate from your node. Is that the idea?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:12:57:

Yeah, I think we're going to start seeing that and then maybe instead of a year you might get it back in a day.

Kevin Rooke - 01:13:04:

Love it.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:13:06:

I'm working on some basically and there is value in somebody who doesn't run a node. Just their liquidity can be valuable.

Kevin Rooke - 01:13:28:

Bitcoin is a productive asset at this point, right? Everyone's bitcoin has the potential to generate sats directly on Lightning with no inflation gains or tokenomics or anything like that. It's just for providing a service. Everyone can do it and all bitcoin works for that purpose, I guess.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:13:49:

Definitely, yeah. And I'm actually working on some things for my Deezy node, like an extension feature to where the target is for non technical users to be able to essentially just say, enter these sort of agreements, earn some rewards from their coins without having to worry about running a node or anything like that. So stay tuned because I hope they have some cool stuff coming out. We're in the works.

Kevin Rooke - 01:14:25:

Now. Is it fair to say that you are a Lightning Loop competitor today? Like a direct competitor to that service? Is that fair?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:14:34:

I don't like to think of it that way. I think they're just different offerings. Like Loop is fantastic, it's trustless.

Kevin Rooke - 01:14:50:

I think they're different on the security spectrum. Talking about the different trade offs for submarine swaps versus a trusted model.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:15:00:

Yeah, but there is some overlap like because the other thing is loop has an intention of not being like a big routing node and that's one of the things that they decided. The way I understand it is they actually sort of intentionally did that they didn't want to become because in the early days they didn't want to become like the Lightning Network hub because it's bad for the network to be that centralized. And so they've been really good about the loop is like a service where you can do swaps, it tends to get funds flowing into it and then they close the channel. So like you don't have this bi directional routing relationship with Loop because if the sats get to Loop side and they always do, loop just closes the channel and that service is super useful. And a market has developed around Loop where people provide liquidity to Loop for a high fee. And whereas with my node I'm hoping to be more bi directional and so I want to be that node where you can have a channel with and I'm not going to close it. It's hard though, because if I'm going to do a swap service, I need to get those on chain coins from somewhere. And so my goal is to not have to close channels on people so you can sit with inbound capacity from my node and eventually get some routing. So I'm working on trying to make that work. I don't know if it's going to be possible, but that's my goal. So one of the things I did actually in the last week is I dropped my routing fees to zero.

Kevin Rooke - 01:16:39:

How's that so far?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:16:42:

It's been great. So watching the guy zero fee routing in his experiment, so setting zero fees, then people pay him upfront to open a channel and he became like a massive source node, which is the opposite of a sync node, which is what Loop is. And so I kind of saw that and was like I think making zero fees will help me become more of a source because I don't want to be a sync, I want to be like a neutral back and forth node. So far it has worked because now that I have zero fees, people are incentivized to open a channel to me, provide me with essentially free inbound capacity. And the reason is because then they get connected to all of my channels for free because I have no routing fees. And so I have attracted more inbound capacity which is great. The downside is my channels do not remain as balanced because I no longer have this budget to rebalance. I mean I could, I could still rebalance and just incur that fee, which I think I'm going to start doing actually. But then anyway, so I can get paid through my swap service now. And so essentially I'm just like zero fee routing guy, he gets paid to open channels so he gets his payment up front and then he routes for free. Most node operators, they get paid per route. And my model is right now, no routing fees, but you pay for my swap service. And so this is just one of the things I sort of saw with zero fee routing. He was a great source but it was hard to like the zero fee routing. His liquidity would all come to my side and I could rebalance out to replenish that, but it was hard and pretty expensive to do that. And so I kind of want to be that source node for other nodes to where they can open a channel with me. They do a quick swap service. Now they have a balanced channel. If it flows all in my direction, that's fine, but I want it to flow both directions so hopefully that'll help it come back and if they ever want to rebalance the channel, they can pay me through the swap service.

Kevin Rooke - 01:19:11:

Right. So you're taking a little bit of inspiration from loop, which is more of a sync, and then a little bit of inspiration from zero fee routing, which is more of a source and hoping that the two kind of counteract each other and generate this like balanced node.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:19:26:

That's exactly right. I don't know if it's going to work. I've gotten some skeptics in the Pub Net Node runners channel, people saying that it's not that simple. I don't think it is that simple, but we'll see. And then the other thing I need is I need to have my swap service is draining my inbound because it's giving on chain away and it's taking Lightning in. I need to have the opposite of that swap service to also get that balance. I need to balance that out. And that's where I'm thinking of working with the non technical users that want to earn who can provide those on chain funds. We think we're going to have something in a little bit that will be useful for that that will provide the opposite of the swap service.

Kevin Rooke - 01:20:26:

Right, it should be interesting. Yeah.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:20:28:

Give me a follow on Twitter because I will announce stuff there.

Kevin Rooke - 01:20:34:

For sure. Now, in your current node setup, is it profitable today or how close are you to that break even point when you include all fees and things like that?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:20:47:

Yeah, my node is profitable.

Kevin Rooke - 01:20:50:

Nice.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:20:51:

Which is very hard. I'm trying to think when it became possible because at first it was like I had a good amount of bitcoin on there and it was not I was paying probably $15 a day. So I run it in the cloud, I run my node in the cloud. I like it for the reliability, uptime, IP address, all that. My cost is like $15 a day, I would say, and it took a long time before I could earn $15 a day from routing.

Kevin Rooke - 01:21:27:

Yeah.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:21:28:

Now what I would say is that a lot of people don't like I put a lot of bitcoin on my node. You might have one bitcoin you're willing to allocate to your node. It's going to be really hard to be profitable with one bitcoin if you're try to be like a hub node. But if you want a secret tip, basically if you can take that one bitcoin and make a very targeted strategy, you can make it. I did make a node for fun that was just one bitcoin, and it was making like it made like $20 a day for a little bit. And the reason is I had a very targeted strategy where the key is you want to get the stuff moving. So you need a lot of velocity and you want to buy inbound liquidity for cheap, and you want to sell the liquidity for more than you bought. The best buyer for liquidity right now is loop. So you open the channel to loop, and then the question is, okay, where can you buy inbound liquidity for cheap? The cheapest way to buy inbound liquidity is from centralized exchanges because a lot of them cover the cost of or sorry, not to cover the cost. Basically what you can do, find a centralized exchange, your favorite one, let's say. What's your favorite centralized exchange?

Kevin Rooke - 01:23:08:

Well, I know they got like Bitfinex and cracking. They have integrations.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:23:12:

Yes.

Kevin Rooke - 01:23:13:

As an example, cracking.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:23:15:

Okay, make an account on cracking. Make a channel with Kraken, equal size channel first. Make a channel with Kraken. Send deposit over Lightning to Kraken. Like the full channel amount, withdraw on chain. Take note of that cost. That cost is going to be like might net from the because they'll charge you for the on chain withdrawal fee. But it's pretty low. So depending on how much you do, you might pay like 100 ppm for that cycle. Now you can open a channel loop and charge 1000 ppm or 300 ppm, whatever, and you'll see it's probably going to flow into loop and there's your quick profit. And now if you can do that with full capacity that you're willing to allocate, you can actually make a decent amount. So I would say having that type of target strategy is also a great way to learn about syncs and sources.

Kevin Rooke - 01:24:15:

That's interesting.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:24:17:

Yeah, I like it.

Kevin Rooke - 01:24:18:

I appreciate the tip. Yes. I know we're running out of time here, but I want to do a segment. I do it at the end of every show. It's called the Lightning round. A few rapid fire questions for you. Are you ready for the Lightning round?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:24:32:

Yes, ready.

Kevin Rooke - 01:24:34:

Welcome to the Lightning Round, presented by Zebedee, your portal into the world of bitcoin gaming. The Zebedee app offers a full featured Lightning wallet, seamlessly integrated with your own personal gamer tag so that you can earn bitcoin on all of Zebedee's games on mobile and desktop. It's never been more fun to earn bitcoin, and Zebedee is your key to it all, to claim your personal gamer tag and start earning some bitcoin of your own. Download the Zebedee app today. First one, and this may be a question you're not allowed to answer, that's fine. If not, but I want a sense for how many people you think are using cache apps. Lightning integration today. If you have to pick a number, I don't even know if you know the number or if you're allowed to share if you have the number. Okay, fine. Figured I have to ask regardless.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:25:26:

I don't know if I'm allowed to say, but if I'm allowed to tweet about it later, that's fair.

Kevin Rooke - 01:25:32:

If you could change one thing about Bitcoin, what would you change?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:25:38:

We're private.

Kevin Rooke - 01:25:39:

Okay. How much can you earn today as a routing node? If you have the right strategy, the right amount of capital, what do you think the most amount of routing node is earning today? In percentage terms is 7%. 7%? That's the highest number I've heard.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:26:04:

If you do this targeted strategy, you can earn more than 7%.

Kevin Rooke - 01:26:09:

Okay. Interesting.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:26:10:

It's hard if you have a lot. If you have a lot more, it's harder to get that high percent.

Kevin Rooke - 01:26:15:

Makes sense. Yeah, that's really interesting. 7%. Wow. What's one thing that people don't understand or appreciate about cash app?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:26:34:

I don't know. People appreciate it. Big company, I would say big public company comes with a lot of slog. Like you got to play by the rules. You can't be like a gangster at a public company.

Kevin Rooke - 01:26:53:

Got it.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:26:54:

It's very hard, but you got to play by the rules and you're just public company.

Kevin Rooke - 01:26:59:

Fair enough. What is one book that has meaningfully changed your view of the world?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:27:07:

Autobiography of a Yogi.

Kevin Rooke - 01:27:10:

Okay. It's a new one. If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be bitcoin, what asset would you pick?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:27:31:

What's it called? Timberland.

Kevin Rooke - 01:27:35:

Timberland, like the boots company?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:27:37:

No, like land with a bunch of trees.

Kevin Rooke - 01:27:42:

Okay. But yeah, with Timber on it. I got you. Interesting. How come?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:27:48:

I think land with trees is going to be valuable. People need trees logging in. I think they're a good asset to where if the price is too low, you just let them keep growing.

Kevin Rooke - 01:28:01:

Yeah, that's fair. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I learned a ton. This was a great conversation. Learned ton about Cash App and about Lightning. Hinge. A routing experience. Where can listeners go to learn more about you and follow you along in your routing journey?

Danny Diekroeger - 01:28:21:

Definitely my Twitter at danny Diekroeger on Twitter. That's where I put stuff. Also you can check out Deezy.io, which is basically the home page for my swap service. But the Twitter is where I'll post updates and everything like that. I have a discord for my Deezy project, which you can find towards the bottom of the Deezy.io website. That's where I think if you're like a node operator you want to learn kind of get in there. I'm trying to be more active in that discord. I'm trying to develop this community of node operators so that I can give you the link to the discord. I'll be there if you want to learn more about this strategy that I mentioned before.

Kevin Rooke - 01:29:11:

Fair enough. Thanks again for taking the time and hope we can do it again soon.

Danny Diekroeger - 01:29:17:

Great, thanks so much, Kevin, for having me. A huge fan of the show. So best of luck to you, and thanks for doing what you do.

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