I consider joining in and be #reckless. I have some design questions though. Under the premise that I mostly dont want to spend funds and want to help process transactions and establish cheap path's along the network. Currently the topology[1] looks to me like there are a couple main hubs and everyone else just attaches to them.
Currently the network is still fairly small. But if you look closely, the network is really not a hub and spoke network. Even if many people have channels with these "main hubs", many of those nodes also have channels with other nodes too. The "hubs" thing right now is probably because there are only a few services that accept LN on mainnet and people are just connecting directly to them in order to pay.
#1 (how connect?) What would be a good approach to establish alternative paths? Connect to all bigger hubs, e.g. all with x+ connections? Or rather establish a connection between other nodes within the network that are not already connected via a single hop?
I suggest you take a look at how LND does autopilot mode. It takes in various inputs and uses a model to figure out what channels are the bets to open. You can read about it in the release notes here:
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/releases/tag/v0.3-alpha#2 (resource requirements?) What (additional) resources are required? Has anyone data on this? I consider upgrading my server anyway, so this would be a good switching point.
LND does not need much more resources than those that are already required for running a full node (because you need a full node). You can also not run a full node and instead run it in SPV mode which uses
BIP 157.
#3 (minimal funds/channel?) The current total capacity is only(?) ~3.68 BTC (again according to[1]), what would be - in your opinion - a good amount to put aside per channel? As much as possible obviously, but at which point does it become too little? Considering I plan to invest X amount of BTC this "minimal amount" would limit the number of channel I could reasonably keep open.
The current protocol limits channels to 2^24 (16777216) satoshis. There is no minimum funds; you can open channels or request channels to be opened where you provide no funds into the channel. IMO putting 0.01 BTC in a channel is reasonable.
#4 (is much work?) How much maintainance is needed? Funds would move between channels, but the main flow may be in a certain direction along the path. Because people just buy stickers instead of sending funds back and forth. Has anyone any experience with this yet?
At least on testnet, there doesn't seem to need much maintenance. The available software are capable of handling things automagically.
