Jeżeli jesteście zainteresowani zarobkami i ogólnym doświadczeniem związanym z utrzymywaniem własnego węzła Lightning, to stworzyłem temat, w którym podzieliłem się swoimi statystykami. Liczę na to, że z czasem więcej osób podzieli się swoimi spostrzeżeniami. Zachęcam do postawienia własnego węzła

Sure, that's what I have been doing as well. Unfortunately, those channels remained silent as I periodically dropped the fees so I decided to make their use free of charge. One channel suddenly started routing transactions again in both directions even after I raised the fees. I will try rebalancing the other channel through a circular payment for a reasonable fee. It became unbalanced just a few hours after it was opened so I might earn back the cost of rebalancing and make some profit easily.

Whoops, I missed n0nce's reply.


That's exactly what I had been avoiding until I made a mistake. I opened a channel to both Bitfinex and Nicehash. I had been routing fairly large payments between those two channels until Bitfinex bumped their fee rate from 1 ppm to 100 ppm. While I was trying to figure it out, I learnt that Nicehash and Bitfinex have had a channel for quite some time. It looks like my node was routing payments between them whenever their channel was unbalanced, which happened quite often. I still keep those two channels open because I keep routing payments through them from/to other channels.


It might sound easy, but it's a huge pain in practice. I mostly use ZigZag.io and Boltz for non-dual-funded channels. When I was running LND node, I tried Loop but it failed 90% of the time. Since I have a couple of active channels, I might try circular rebalance soon. Also, it makes sense to wait a couple of days and see if the channel will balance itself.

You should give BlueWallet a try. It's a custodial wallet so you won't have to worry about opening and balancing your channels - they are slightly to difficult to understand at first. Every time you want someone to send you coins, you need to provide them a payment invoice. The Lightning Network does not use addresses.

The easiest and the fastest way for you would be to use the lncli fwdinghistory command. If you have some spare time, you could install either ThunderHub or RTL. I haven't used the former one since it's LND exclusive but it should be as good as RTL or even better for channel management. It will be much easier for you to interpret all the data if you use either of them. The graphs I posted were created by RTL.

I have recently set my fees to 0/0 for some of my channels because they become totally unbalanced. I usually keep my fee rates around 15-30 ppm with one exception - the channel with bfx-lnd1 node. I routed quite a few transactions through it with a fee rate > 90 ppm. All of my channels have 0 msat base fee now.


No, I hardly ever route payments lower than 10k satoshi. There is usually an interval of a few hours between them.

Note: This thread is self-moderated to prevent it from being derailed. Please, keep the discussion on Lightning implementations and your experience of running a node. Any related questions are welcome.

I have been running my current c-lightning node for over 4 months now so I would like to share some data with you. I would appreciate if other node operators could share their experience, thoughts and anything else like plugins, fee strategy, third-party software.

My node's URI is 0273da0a525390c36857841e208f1d289275c76ebfa7ecfde697c6cbf4f235b4f5@fjpmf23cd2c6sqp7e4wzexa6ixkttl3jabivldakwq733tw634ymjbid.onion:9735

My node has successfully routed 143 payments (until the 31st October) with ~0.09 BTC capacity and 5 active channels. Here's a breakdown of my earnings from payment routing into each month:

July: 539.54 sat/17 forwards



August: 114.64 sat/34 forwards



September: 161.75 sat/28 forwards



October: 75.56 sat/64 forwards



The largest payment I have ever routed was 960,320 satoshi and I got paid 77.825 satoshi for it. The highest fee I have ever charged was 91.476 satoshi for a 952,385 satoshi payment. 23 forwards were free of charge. As you can see, I made the highest profit in July. That's probably because I was adjusting my fee policy for each channel manually every few days unlike the other months - I adjusted my fee policy only at the beginning and at the end of each month. I haven't used any fee auto-adjusting plugins yet.

While it's true that earnings from my Lightning node do not cover the electricity cost of my server (which I also use for other projects anyway), I have already earned back the fees I paid to open my channels. Note that some of my channels were not opened by me which means that I did not have to pay anything for them. Also, I saved some money by opening more than one channel in a single transaction and opening dual-funded channels so that I would not have to worry about using paid third-party services to balance my channels.

You might be surprised by the number of failed forwards - 389 payments. Why are there so many of them? More than 95% of them failed at some further point in the route. It's difficult to tell how many of them were legitimate payments and not channel/route probing attempts. I used some website a couple of time to probe routes from/to my node and each time I would get another three failed payments.

There's a great entry in the documentation about various backup practices. You will probably end up using the backup plugin with a remote directory or some removable drive.


You could simply copy your hsm_secret and lightningd.sqlite3 files to your new node. This way, you wouldn't have to close your channels. Just make sure to copy lightnind.sqlite3 while your node is not running and don't turn it on afterwards.

I don't mind if your node is offline for a couple of days after we open a channel. We can do whatever you are more comfortable with. Would you like to try opening a dual-funded channel with me? I could contribute at least 1M satoshi to the channel.

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There's a couple of things that you need to know before "opening a Lightning account".

You could use a custodial wallet like BlueWallet. This way, you would not have to worry about inbound liquidity and being online 24/7. If you decide to run your own node or use a non-custodial wallet, you will have to worry about inbound capacity - you will have to make room for incoming funds by spending some coins over the Lightning Network.

If you use a non-custodial wallet, you won't be able to receive any payments unless you keep your wallet open. The same applies to a node, but you would probably keep it online 24/7 anyway.

That's also how I have been doing it. This time, I can't compile the update and I am getting the following error ~1 minute after running make.


Edit: It looks like sudo pip3 install mrkd solved the problem. I am not sure why I didn't need it before.

By the way, how is your node n0nce?

c-lightning v0.10.2 has been released. You should upgrade your nodes as this update patches the CVE-2021-41592 vulnerability. LND users should also update to v0.13.3-beta.

In December, they announced that the Lightning Network support was expected to be available in the first half of 2021. It looks like they are still working on it.


They probably don't feel any pressure to do so because: 1) The transaction fees have been extremely low for quite some time now. 2) Even if any large exchange implements Lightning late, there still will be a lot of people willing to open a channel with their node.

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It looks like more and more exchanges are implementing it or are interested in doing so. I am surprised that these exchanges are not taking advantage of it in their advertisements to encourage users to use their service.


You can still pay someone on-chain with the coins you locked up. Right now, you can use third-party services like Boltz, ZigZag and Lightning Conductor. However, this solution is prone to routing failures, which are less frequent now thanks to multi-path payments (MPPs).

In the future, it will be possible to alter the total channel balance through splicing.

As the error suggests, you should update Electrum. Download it from the official website and make sure to verify the installation file.

That depends on your use case. If you need to be able to receive payments 24/7 then you should use a custodial payment gateway or set up your own c-lightning/LND node alongside BTCPayServer.


I would have to provide you an invoice. BlueWallet does not support keysend for some reason but it supports LNURL. This article explains quite well what it can be used for.


On the other hand, Lightning is even faster and might be cheaper to use for the users

Sorry for a late reply. I have been slightly busy lately.


This explanation should help you understand it. Here you can find the formulas which are used to calculate revocation public and private keys

revoke_and_ack message looks like this:


Your node must provide per_commitment_secret associated with the next_per_commitment_point which you sent previously in either funding_locked or revoke_and ack message.


An HTLC is basically an additional output of a commitment transaction with a specific locking script. If an HTLC is below the dust limit then it is added to the transaction fee (only when the payment has not been settled yet). There is no real incentive for the other party to cheat in this particular case. If you are not comfortable with that, you can always refuse to route payments below the dust limit.

I am still not sure why you mentioned it. If Alice broadcast the first commitment transaction (the one which refunds her 10 BTC), Bob could simply publish a penalty transaction because Alice revealed the secret needed to derive the revocation key for her outdated commitment.

It wouldn't make sense for Bob to broadcast the second commitment transaction if Alice broadcast the first one because: A) It would be rejected by most nodes due to double-spend B) It would probably be more expensive


You're right. I assumed that they managed to sign the second commitment transaction successfully. If we assume that they failed to sign it, there is no need to worry about that HTLC. If Alice refuses to revoke her previous commitment and sign Bob's new transaction, Bob should not reveal the payment preimage needed to claim that HTLC.

I guess you could call me a fan. I ran a couple of small Lightning nodes in the past. Here is my current node:

https://1ml.com/node/0273da0a525390c36857841e208f1d289275c76ebfa7ecfde697c6cbf4f235b4f5


It's great for non-technical users and for people who just want to try out the Lightning Network for the first time. I don't think it would be suitable for any kind of project.