I apologize if these have been addressed in the docs, but I couldn't find the answers there.
Is it possible to keep my network and its transactions private? I'm interested in implementing Stellar within my own network and don't want any transaction data to be visible to anyone. Not even the users of the network. Obviously users can see their own transaction history, but not anyone else's.
Just how strict are the hardware requirements? Is there any wiggle room there? What if I'm starting out with a low volume, do I still need 4 cores and 8 gigs of RAM?
How exactly do the fees work? I couldn't find any clear reference to whether Stellar gets fees on transactions. Since I can set the fees myself, I'm inclined to believe there isn't a fee that goes to Stellar. But if that's the case, then why is there a minimum lumen balance?
AML Compliance. I'm trying to avoid regulation for privacy purposes. Is it possible to ignore this part? I understand the legal risks involved. If not, can I conduct the verification of the identity of my users without having an external financial institution involved?
Can I be the issuer on my own network? I'm really trying to avoid involving any third parties and giving them access to user data and transactions. Would there be any challenges if I opted to go this route? To be clear, I'm not interested in having my own currency. If anything, I'd want to even avoid using lumen and make only Monero or Dash the default currency. And by default, I want my users to send fiat to each other. The option to send Monero/Dash would also be available for advanced users. But in the default case, the user would send $10 for example to another user and the backend would convert those $10 into Monero/Dash and send those tokens over the network. On the other end, they would be converted back into $10 before the value of either currency changes, and the receiver sees $10 in their account's wallet that they can then either withdraw to their payment method of choice or transfer to another crypto wallet. Is there anything wrong with this scenario?
How are the transaction speeds like? Are they fast enough to be instantaneous, or close to it, even when performing two conversions per transactions like I discussed above? If there is a delay, how much is it? Is it noticeable enough to the end user that I need to mention it? Does this depend on my hardware?
Where are the coins stored? In the example above, if the user that received $10 didn't withdraw his funds and kept them in his wallet. Are those funds sitting on my servers, or on his device? Is it possible to keep it on the user's device? I feel like this would limit the attractiveness of my servers as an attack target.
Speaking of security, if I were to be my own issuer, what's stopping me from creating an endless amount of coins and converting them to fiat? More realistically, what's stopping a potential attacker from doing so if they gained access into my system? Obviously I'll be keeping things as secure as they possibly can be, and encrypting everything end to end. But I would still like to make it so that even if I do get hacked, there's not much an attacker can do beyond seeing transaction history at the most.
Is it possible, now or in the future, to decentralize the processing of transactions across all the devices of all my users? To not only limit the performance hit on my servers, but also to make sure the network keeps running even if my servers are down or if my users don't have access to the internet. For example, would users be able to send money to each other over Bluetooth, WiFi or perhaps even LAN?
Is it possible to use Stellar for anything other than payments? For example, messaging. I've seen many instances of messenger apps running on blockchains, where they send messages along with tokens. Would it be possible to do this, or would it be too basic to be useful?
Alternatively to #10, has anyone considered or attempted integration into Matrix? It's a fully featured "decentralized" messaging system with experimental P2P support. It would be incredibly attractive to create a bridge for Stellar.