Thread by @JackMallers

1/ Running a massive set of Lightning nodes for @ln_strike has been fun and really interesting.

With Strike rapidly growing, we were seeing spikes of payment failure rates for the first time. Investigating lead us to some interesting insights 👇

2/ Leaving our nodes open to any incoming connection allowed anyone to open channels to us. Almost all of these channels were bad channels and resulted in difficulties for our nodes.

Our nodes were struggling and encountering memory spikes correlated to payment failures

3/ So, first things first, we deployed @lightning's "Channel Acceptors" feature, allowing us to only accept incoming channels from peers we are interested in.

Secondly, we tweaked our payment probe logic to be more in line with MPP, which can return multiple HTLC attempts.

4/ We added a few more things and tweaked some others.

Since @mrfelton deployed these changes, we haven't had a failed payment since ⚡️🌩️💃

Lightning haters may not like it, but we're settling thousands of payments every day instantly and for a few sats with no problems 😀

5/ Strike may give LN its first real throughput test. These are all new challenges, but the only way to learn is to try.

As we grow, Lightning will grow with us. I'm excited to share our learnings/expertise and get bigger businesses and exchanges onboard. its_happening.gif 🚀🌚