I just noticed that vapourminer (supposedly intentionally) showered me in exactly the right amount of merits to become a Legendary account. Well spotted!

While that wasn't a goal that I ever specifically wanted to achieve it still feels like a nice acknowledgement from you guys and I would like to thank all of you for that. Some of you obviously wanted to make me a Legendary and I would like to thank you for that appreciation, feels really good.

Also I hope vapourminers MRI today went well. Crossing fingers for you mate!

Now forward and onward with you honeybadger, we are ready and it's about time.

I stand corrected, I misread that into the onion_ files that popped up first from my grep, overlooking the libplugin-pay.c.

---

Reposting this from WO thread here as heads-up:



[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

Obviously they withdrew their own routes from BGP in an automation snafu, so basically they nuked themselves from the internet.

Funny quote from The Reg article:


You can't make such stuff up, doors don't open because fb.com is down.

Makes perfect sense, I confused capacity with current liquidity.
Otherwise it would be possible to see which channels are used or not by taking snapshots of the liquidity balance from them. My thinking error.


Thanks, funny enough the two errors I get locally are not listed there:

From grepping the sources I conclude these are both related to tor connections in some way.
The first seems to be nodes down the routing path being unreachable and the second I do not understand completely yet but it seems related to a disagreement of nodes regarding some HTLC parameters.
Will keep reading the debug.log around successful and failed transactions to try to get a better understanding on what exactly happens under the hood.

Thanks for your reply and explanation, that's comforting to know, I first thought I'd possibly stuck my fat fingers too deep into the thing at some point


Checking further, I saw that I also have a few "Local Failed" transactions.
But I am still wondering what would make a transaction fail. I played around a bit with the "getroute" rpc command and I was under the impression that querying a route given a certain amount to transfer will only return channels that have the respective capacity/liquidity to route this payment. Is this wrong? Does getroute not know the capacity/liquidity of channels in transit?
Or what other reasons can make a transaction fail (locally or remote)?

I get about as much failed transactions as successful ones on my node.

Does anybody know how I can further investigate the reason for failed transactions (RTL just says "failed" as status) ?

Our gubbermint announced last Friday to hire 1700 "consultants" to go from door to door and talk the unvaccinated into getting vaccinated.
Also there is a bounty if you can convince somebody else to bite the bullet, you get 50 bucks for everybody who refers to you as your "vaccination convincer" upon getting the shot.

Still you get to sign a form that you are 100% voluntarily getting vaccinated, otherwise you won't get the shot(s).

I would be really interested who in our government holds Moderna or Pfizer stocks.

P.S.: Our countries huge stockpile of vaccinations expires in about a month - but that certainly has nothing to do with it, it's all only for our best.

That's not mocacinno's fault, when he wrote that walkthrough Centos 7 was still a thing with an EOL far in the future but Redhat (IBM) totally fucked this one up.
They saw Centos eating into their RHEL sales a lot and decided to move EOL for 7 and 8 forward quickly (8 EOLs end of this year). It will be replaced by Centos Stream which is unsuitable as a free replacement for RHEL in the enterprise landscape like Centos was as it seems to be a rolling version.

However the Centos community forked AlmaLinux which aims to replace Centos as free point release of the RHEL sources and so far it does a great job. Projects that build on Centos now mostly use AlmaLinux.
I would say most if not all of this walkthrough should work with AlmaLinux perfectly fine.

Yes, that and you get the advantage of being able to restrict access further by ip-addresses (and more webserver config kung-fu if you like).
It's certainly not advisable but RTL can be exposed to the network in many easier ways (like a port redirector).

And perfectly timed to the dip somebody pushed about 6MB worth of 1sat/b transactions into the mempool:



https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,8h,weight

Interesting... (and no, I don't think these are panic sellers sending their corn to exchanges)

(My lightning funding tx can wait a few hours, easy-peasy..)

Thanks, I see the point for setting base to zero and having a percentage fee only. I will let that sink but I guess it boils down to concentrate on one of the fees and set the other to 0.


Good to know, I have tried that now and it turns out it was easier than thought and meanwhile I am announcing ipv4, ipv6 and tor v3 addresses (needed to compile the latest tor version as the one that came with the OS didn't support v3 services).

Thank you for your reply and explanations so far.


Thanks a lot for that, I think I got it now how fees are set.
What I am still unclear is how the fee collection works, are you saying that if Alice pays to Bob over nodes X, Y and Z, X charges a fee to Alice and pays from that Y fees, who in turn pays Z fees?
Like in:
Alice - [X] - [Y] - [Z] - Bob
So fees have to be X^fee > Y^fee > Z^fee, otherwise somebody is going to make a loss?
Or if I am for example X, would I calculate Y's fees and add it ontop of mine and charge the sum to Alice, like in calculating total cost of a specific route?

Sorry for the stupid question, I just read https://medium.com/suredbits/lightning-101-lightning-network-fees-86abbbc17024 and I am none the wiser still.
EDIT: Just found this one, and it says Alice pays the sum of all fees to X, X pays Y and Z fees to Y etc.



Yeah I started to figure that negotiating channels with peers is going to be the fun part, almost like negotiating peerings in the old internet days. I was interested in the autopilot to a) get a grip on how plugins work in c-lightning and b) to see what it would do in dry-run. But I am all game for the social fun part of establishing channels  



That's something to start off from, thanks a lot.
And for the base fee, free/0?


Also I am wondering about tor vs. clear-net nodes, is it possible to "dual-host" a node on tor AND clear-net at the same time or do I have to stick with one or the other?

Thank you for your reply, you are ofcourse right, I replied to your post in your thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.msg58004580#msg58004580

I am posting this reply here, it was Rath_'s reply to my post in the bitcoind, c-lightning and RTL on centos 7 (walktrough) thread and he rightly suggested to come here with my questions.


No, to be honest I do not seem to understand the fee system fully yet. I have a solid understanding of how the fees work on-chain but not in lightning. From what I've seen there is a base fee and a percentage of the amount to be sent?


Good point, I guess that's because RTL sets the on-chain fee for the funding transaction high enough to get into the next block at anytime and by doing it manually you can use 1-2sat/byte and just wait some time.


Oh plugins, that's one open construction site I still have  Didn't really work out yet, there are a few I would like to use, like the sqlite3 duplication and ev. autopilot but I can't get them to run yet. But I understand the general idea is not to care about the defaults, but fine-tune each channel so that it starts routing payments.
What are some ballpark figures for like dirt-cheap but not free and what are some upper bounds before it becomes criminal price gouging (yeah I understand, the network just routes around expensive nodes, but you should get the idea what I try to ask for)?


I am all in, just need some time to get more experience in operation of my node before I waste your time. I will happily get back to you by PM in the next days. I still need to finalize the setup in terms of DR plan / backup / resilience. I'll still need some assistance in creating this via rpc interface.

Thanks for the advice to move my questions to here, which I did.
I should have posted my questions here in the first place as you suggested, I only wanted to let mocacinno know how much his walkthrough helped me.

Thank you mocacinno for this excellent walk-through!
I used it to setup my own lightning node on Devuan (hating systemd and the Poettering fuckwit so much I went that extra mile) and it's supported by my VPS host.

What was impressing with the latest bitcoin core v22.0 is that synching from scratch took less than 24hrs on a pretty low-end VPS with spinning rust. Last time I synched a bitcoin node in 2014 (on much more low-end HW) it took me 2 weeks.

Overall a very exciting experience thanks to your HowTo, I greatly appreciate the time you have taken and I am very pleased with the results so far!

Now I have to go to find out how I set the fees (working with the defaults so far) and what reasonable fees are. I don't want to go full free (because what's free is not worth anything) but to set very moderate/low fees. If anybody has any reading pointers on how fees work in lightning, what good settings are etc., I would be happy to hear about that.
Also, I would be interested what the settings of "urgent", "normal", "slow" etc. mean when setting up a new channel, I guess urgent translates to high fees, but I am not sure yet.

Are people setting their fees on a per-channel basis or globally?

Again, thank you very much for the great HowTo, it gave me a great and easy start into the topic!

Dear Lord, dear Chartbuddy, dear Elon and all the others mighty enough to move the BTC price with the blink of an eye:

Please make the price do something so that we can leave these pointless and exclusively dividing vaccination arguments behind us and get back to lovely SOMA TA with dragon drawings, rollercoaster memes, lengthy AI novels, lightning appraisal, ranch and sea property development progress reports and planning of the 1M party.
I would prefer an increase, but hell if it takes a nose dive to stop this hateful crap I'll be fine with it too.

Amen.Weeeeeh!

I am not a smart phone user so my question may be dumb, apologies then.
But what keeps you from backing up your 2FA OTP key in a safe place and just restoring it on the new phone? I mean it's a pretty short character string that even can be handwritten on a post-it (pun intended).

SMS ist just unsafe and dangerous for such sensitive things in todays world.

[EDIT]: I just realized what I wrote above when I said "I am not a smart phone user", I actually meant "I am not a smartphone user". But since both apply equally well to me I'll stick with the first one 

Good Wonderful find, that is really hilarious timing. Literally have coffee on my screen now 

Oh the irony..

Slightly off-topic, but if you are using an Azure VPS, you'd better check this:

https://www.wiz.io/blog/secret-agent-exposes-azure-customers-to-unauthorized-code-execution

TL;DR: Just send NO authentication headers and you are root on virtual Linux machines with OMI installed (they kindly install it for you in many to most cases).

In the 90's we often joked that the first Microsoft product that won't suck will be a vacuum cleaner... (obviously this one just doesn't get old).

Just watched the German "Tagesschau" on one of two of their national channels (ARD). Almost spit my fine meal across the table and thought I'd quickly recap what was told:

• The cryptocurrency (<- trigger warning) Bitcoin which is also favoured a lot by criminals has lost 30% yesterday, right in the moment when El Salvador started to use it as official payment method
• What caused Bitcoin to fall so tremendously? Answer from the stock exchange correspondent: Because the introduction was a massive failure, but also because this "experiment" calls regulators to arms who are afraid that this will be abused for criminal and illegal activity.
• El Salvador says it will attract investors and make international remittances easier but regulators say the risk this will facilitate money laundering is increasing
• The Bitcoin community applauded El Salvador frenetically first, but now (the Bitcoin fans) talk about an own goal.

For myself I take away two points:

• The MSM (even those that think they are the good guys) are useless if not rightout means of propaganda for those in power.
• Bitcoin is taken very serious (that's why they attack it hard now), this tells me we're on the right way.

I see a lot of fear in the eyes of our opponents, this is a great sign, but IMO we should expect some drastic steps from them in the time to come.