Bitcoin Forum

How do you make money on transactions with a bitcoin node?  I saw somewhere this was possible with a lightning node.  Maybe there are other ways?  I tried installing the Electrum wallet, but it never earned a profit.

That's not how Bitcoin works. You can only "earn money" if you do actual "work" and "mine" blocks with your mining equipment. Nodes do not get paid anything.

Lightning Network is different, it is a second layer built on top of Bitcoin and since there is no mining there, we have a teeny tiny fee paid to LN nodes that relay the transactions. It is not big enough to be called "profit" in my opinion.

With running your own node, you can protect your privacy and you also help the network to be more decentralized.
As mentioned above by pooya87, you don't earn anything just with running a node.

By the way, you didn't run a node, just with installing electrum. Electrum is a SPV wallet and you connect to nodes run by third parties.

How have you been on Bitcointalk since 2017?

You might be talking about POS coins where you can have a node and then stake coins to get rewarded from fees or a masternode or validator nodes.
It is not the same as Bitcoin having a node won't make money unless someone hires you to have a full node or rents it and uses your node as their private node.
Lightning is another option like they said it's not worth it because the fees on lightning nodes are cheap.

Running a full node (Bitcoin Node) is only a way of making yourself and transactions more private, it's also an indirect way of helping the Bitcoin network to become more decentralized as mentioned above. Bitcoin is another kind of money, just like the normal fiat you don't earn it except you get a real job and get paid, so Bitcoin too. you have to work for your Bitcoin hence running a node is not working for anyone but yourself.

Pooya87 has given a perfect answer for the lightning node thing.


Hilarious   ;D
It's really worth asking... Or should I still refer OP to learnmeabitcoin to understand how Bitcoin works.

Electrum isn't Bitcoin or LN node software.


It doesn't even cover electricity cost and LN wallet usually would choose route with lowest total relay fee.

I don't even think anyone can hire you as their 'private node' and connect their wallet to your full node. The goal of running a full node is privacy, so it would be stupid for someone to pay to connect to a third party node, losing their privacy in the process; when they can simply connect their spv wallet to any third party node without paying any fee.

With Electrum wallet, you can not run a Bitcoin node, either a full node or a prune node. Because Electrum is a SPV wallet. [1]

To run a full node or prune node, you must use wallet like Bitcoin Core but Bitcoin node does not earn bitcoin. The Bitcoin network is Proof of Work so miners work with their hashrate to find blocks and confirm transactions. They get Bitcoin block rewards include block subsidy and transaction fee.

With Lightning Network channel, read the explanation from pooya and [2]

[1] Simplified Payment Verification (https://bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/simplified-payment-verification) wallet.
[2] [Table] All Lightning Network Threads In One Place (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5345664.0)

I've had a service which helps people to run a node for cheap and there is a market for this.

Generally, my clients are more interested in either running nodes for fun or to use the RPC on Bitcoin Core and scrape the data accordingly. I doubt that their focus is on privacy, you can probably be okay with privacy without having to run a full node either. Not perfect, but decent.

I agree. Buy if you also run watchtower, theoretically you could make SPV/light LN wallet user pay to use your watchtower. Although it seems people generally running it altruistically and i don't remember which LN wallet which can make payment to watchtower service.

It depends on variable factors related to the economics of scale. If you run 10 BTC nodes, with low dedicated server costs, a large number of channels, and you are lucky that onchain fees for opening/closing channels are low, then profits are possible.

Routing fee is usually very low (about 0.05%) and you have relatively high operational costs. Therefore, it is not easy to make profits from routing mall channels such as 1,000,000 sats but it may be possible with 20 BTC, low operational cost and onchain fees may wipe out all your profits so it is economies of scale and a little luck or to monitor the memepool.