Hey LoyceV , as far as swapping to alts there's zigzag.io Dash,LTC and ETH are on the list
Fee's are high though.
I haven't tried zigzag yet. I did try coinplaza.it, which has surprisingly low fees for a small transaction (even to onchain Bitcoin).
There's also fixedfloat.com, which I haven't tried yet.
Now consider LN Hubs will be processing offchain transactions in microseconds ,
So LN hubs hardware requirements/cost will grow at a much higher rate, especially the Main Hubs.
Unlike Bitcoin, that only charges to include a transaction in a block,
LN will impose variable fees on you for each hub needed to complete a LN transaction plus the 2 onchain bitcoin fees.
So how in your mind do you see LN fees staying cheap,
when there hardware requirements/cost for nodes are greater, and they have the ability to set their own LN fees.
I don't worry about this for the following reasons:
Bitcoin fees spiraled up because users have no choice. Miners only compete against each other for blocks, but that doesn't increase block space.
In LN, there will be many different routes, and hub owners compete against each other on fees. If fees are high and hub owners make large profits, new actors will join the hub-market until fees are lower again.
More transactions obviously increase hardware requirements, but more transactions also means there are more fees to be earned. At the moment I don't think hub owners make a profit from the few small fees. They actually need much more transactions to earn money. If there would be a million times more transactions, I don't think the hardware cost per transaction will be very high.
Update on my little experiment: now that I have a second channel, a 5 sat transaction takes only 5 msat fee, instead of 1 sat. That makes sense, as the other channel has a lower fee.
However, a 100 sat transaction now takes over 3 sat fee! It uses the new channel, while the other channel would have charged only 1 sat. So I guess routing still needs some work.
For small transactions, 3% is not a problem. However, if I would send (say) 0.1
BTC, I would like to see the fee upfront if it's going to be around 3%. I'm not sure if LN even supports that before completing the channel.
Another update: Despite having 2.5 m
BTC "Total can send", I can't send 2 m
BTC ("Your Lightning channels do not have enough balance"). When I try to send 1 m
BTC, I get: "Payment failed, Route not found". After trying a few times, Coinplaza banned my IP for a few minutes.
I've read before that "larger" payments often can't be routed, now I found out by myself
I made several smaller payments to my account at tippin.me, which all worked. The total was >1 m
BTC now. But: fees were just over 3%, which is the maximum Eclair allows (and the only thing about it in settings). I've recently made cheaper on-chain payments!
From tippin.me, I sent 101010.10 sat to coinplaza.it. This got me 1 m
BTC on-chain to my Bitcoin address. And although
1 sat/byte is enough, coinplaza.it paid 128 sat/byte, which is about 31 times more than the margin they had on this transaction.
I pay much less fee through tippin.me than through the last channel I opened in Eclair. I'll try opening a channel to tippin.me's node next time.
After many transactions, Eclair doesn't show my full Payments history anymore. I can only see the last 5 days.
So far, I've lost less than 1 m
BTC in total on fees. Not bad for a week and a half of LN-experimenting.
I think I picked a LN node without enough cheap connections.
I'm closing the "expensive" channel now, see how that works. It says "CLOSING (cooperative"). It should be able to do this at very low fee. It looks like my 1.42 m
BTC LN-balance turned into 1.32 m
BTC on-chain. The total fee wasn't that high, but still 10-20 times higher than needed for a fast confirmation.
QuestionHow do I choose which node to open a channel to?
And: I expected payments to use both channels when possible, but until now that hasn't happened.
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