The Lightning Network FAQ

[cfbtcman]

@cfbtcman

please stop posting, you're talking total nonsense


this subforum is for cogent questions on and disseminating the technical aspects of Bitcoin, you are clearly incapable of making a useful contribution

Im showing pratical cases about LN, it seems in this wallet we can only receive after we give, if id like to receive without giving what can i do?
Imagine i want to open a comercial website selling 1 product by $1, i will sell 1 million products in one month, so 1 million dolares, how can i receive it by LN without need to put first 1 millions of dolars IN ?

If you know other wallet that permit that in LN please teach, because its seems we cant do it in Lighting Labs wallet, the other wallets permit that?

P.S.- If you are PRO it seems you are not doing nothing usefull too:

BTC 10 years existence = +- 450.000 transactions/day limit
BCH 2 years existence  = 8.3 millions ?
BSV 1 year existence = 16 millions ?

What are you doing there?

[Carlton Banks]

Im showing pratical cases about LN

you're doing nothing of the sort, hush

[cfbtcman]

TL;DR Eclair Mobile is the best choice for now if you don't want to use a custodial wallet.

I installed Eclair Mobile and to receive LN it says i cant stay 2 weeks without connecting the phone to internet, what happens if i stay more than 2 weeks disconnected, i can lost LN funds?

[Rath_]

I installed Eclair Mobile and to receive LN it says i cant stay 2 weeks without connecting the phone to internet, what happens if i stay more than 2 weeks disconnected, i can lost LN funds?

If the other party forcefully closes the channel with an old state while you are offline, the closing transaction will be able to be confirmed after 2 weeks. You have 2 weeks to come back online. If you manage to do it, Eclair Mobile will publish a penalty transaction for you. Note that it will only happen if the other party has a malicious intent. I have never experienced it despite having many opened channels.

However, if you were to close the channel, you would have to wait only 720 blocks (~5 days). These are the default values negotiated by Eclair Mobile before the channel is funded.

[cfbtcman]

Is running a Lightning Network node demanding?

You have to run a Bitcoin full node which uses the biggest part of available resources.


Do I have to run a full Bitcoin node?

No. LND supports neutrino which allows user to run a light node instead of a full one. It is a good solution for devices with low processing power and storage (Raspberry Pi).

Hi, i was reading your FAQ and i see that two contradictory sentences, please review that.
I watch too that in future LN will have Dual funded channels (both parties will be able to fund a channel) thats why i cant receive money, i thought all the channels was dual funded, that way i can run a node without putting any money IN and dont risk to loose money, is that right?

[LoyceV]

Hi, i was reading your FAQ and i see that two contradictory sentences, please review that.

It's not contradicting:
1. Is running a node demanding? Yes.
2. Do I have to run a node? No.

I watch too that in future LN will have Dual funded channels (both parties will be able to fund a channel) thats why i cant receive money

An easy way to get inbound capacity is to exchange some of your Bitcoin Lightning balance for Bitcoin on-chain. I've used Coinplaza.it for this at 1% fee. For a small amount, the fee they charge can be lower than the Bitcoin network fee they use.

As an alternative, in Eclair Wallet you can request inbound liquidity when you open a channel. That means the node will open and fund a channel back to you. I think they charge 1% for this (for 30 days), but the minimum amount is much higher than what you can exchange through Coinplaza.

[Rath_]

Hi, i was reading your FAQ and i see that two contradictory sentences, please review that.

Thanks for drawing my attention to these questions. I will rephrase the answers in a moment. LND is the only implementation that supports neutrino, so you have to run a full node on the others.

i thought all the channels was dual funded, that way i can run a node without putting any money IN and dont risk to loose money, is that right?

As long as you don't have any coins on your side, yes. However, you won't be able to send transactions over the Lightning Network in such a case.

[Wind_FURY]

Hi, i was reading your FAQ and i see that two contradictory sentences, please review that.

It's not contradicting:
1. Is running a node demanding? Yes.
2. Do I have to run a node? No.

I watch too that in future LN will have Dual funded channels (both parties will be able to fund a channel) thats why i cant receive money

An easy way to get inbound capacity is to exchange some of your Bitcoin Lightning balance for Bitcoin on-chain. I've used Coinplaza.it for this at 1% fee. For a small amount, the fee they charge can be lower than the Bitcoin network fee they use.

As an alternative, in Eclair Wallet you can request inbound liquidity when you open a channel. That means the node will open and fund a channel back to you. I think they charge 1% for this (for 30 days), but the minimum amount is much higher than what you can exchange through Coinplaza.

You can also try Bitrefill for inbound capacity, https://www.bitrefill.com/

You can also purchase it with Dash, Dogrcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. Hahaha.

[cfbtcman]

Hi, i was reading your FAQ and i see that two contradictory sentences, please review that.

It's not contradicting:
1. Is running a node demanding? Yes.
2. Do I have to run a node? No.

I watch too that in future LN will have Dual funded channels (both parties will be able to fund a channel) thats why i cant receive money

An easy way to get inbound capacity is to exchange some of your Bitcoin Lightning balance for Bitcoin on-chain. I've used Coinplaza.it for this at 1% fee. For a small amount, the fee they charge can be lower than the Bitcoin network fee they use.

As an alternative, in Eclair Wallet you can request inbound liquidity when you open a channel. That means the node will open and fund a channel back to you. I think they charge 1% for this (for 30 days), but the minimum amount is much higher than what you can exchange through Coinplaza.

You can also try Bitrefill for inbound capacity, https://www.bitrefill.com/

You can also purchase it with Dash, Dogrcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. Hahaha.

Ok and how can that guys coinplaza or bitrefill have so much inbound, need to run a node?

[Rath_]

Ok and how can that guys coinplaza or bitrefill have so much inbound, need to run a node?

They run their own Lightning Network nodes and open new channels to people who want to rent inbound capacity from them. For example, Bitrefill charges 0.00005700 BTC for a 0.005 BTC channel. That's how they profit from locking up their coins for some time. Note that they also need to have inbound capacity if they want to route payments properly.

[cfbtcman]

Ok and how can that guys coinplaza or bitrefill have so much inbound, need to run a node?

They run their own Lightning Network nodes and open new channels to people who want to rent inbound capacity from them. For example, Bitrefill charges 0.00005700 BTC for a 0.005 BTC channel. That's how they profit from locking up their coins for some time. Note that they also need to have inbound capacity if they want to route payments properly.

I see, so every node have standard limits to start or it depends the money owners put in?

[Rath_]

I see, so every node have standard limits to start or it depends the money owners put in?

No, there isn't a minimum amount of coins needed to start a node. You can run a Lightning Network node without any channels (no coins used) as long as you have available resources on your server. The Lightning Network node without any channels doesn't do anything at all. The node has its own on-chain address from which coins are taken when one wants to fund a channel. One can't open a big Lightning Network channel and split it later into smaller ones.

[cfbtcman]

I see, so every node have standard limits to start or it depends the money owners put in?

No, there isn't a minimum amount of coins needed to start a node. You can run a Lightning Network node without any channels (no coins used) as long as you have available resources on your server. The Lightning Network node without any channels doesn't do anything at all. The node has its own on-chain address from which coins are taken when one wants to fund a channel. One can't open a big Lightning Network channel and split it later into smaller ones.

Yeah, but i have my on-chain channel and i first need to send the coins to another LN address and just after that i can start to receive, in the case of making a node i can start to receive immediately or i need to send coins first too?

[Rath_]

Yeah, but i have my on-chain channel and i first need to send the coins to another LN address and just after that i can start to receive, in the case of making a node i can start to receive immediately or i need to send coins first too?

Once you fund the node's on-chain address and decide to open a channel, your coins will be automatically moved to a new multisig address controlled by you and the other party who accepted your proposal. After a few confirmations, the channel will become active and you should be able to send coins over the Lightning Network. You won't be able to receive payments unless you spend some coins or ask someone to open a channel to you.

[bitart]

Hi,
I've read the FAQ and have a simple question:
I know that it's possible to run a LN node on Raspberry PI (because I have one and I had a node on it in 2017 (I know, long time ago))
Fees has settled and I've switched off the node and forgot about it, it's in the drawer, untouched since the power off.
It was a neutrino node (without the copy of the blockchain downloaded locally)

So my question is:
If I just switch it on, it will be really outdated (it was an LND node)

Does it worth the time and the energy to start again with a Raspberry PI? (I have it, I won't use it for anything else, and I don't want to sell it, so if it won't be painfully slow or useless, is there any reason why not to play with it again?)

If it's OK to start a node on Raspberry, which one would you recommend?
Is neutrino a working solution now (it was in a really beta state in 2017), or I should attach a HDD to the PI with the blockchain, downloaded previously with a PC, and start a full node?

Thanks for the answers in advance, I'm not lazy to read and to search, but I need someone to show the right direction before I start searching and reading a lot

[Carlton Banks]

neutrino's probably improved since you last used it, but I don't have any experience of that. The bitcoin network will have alot more neutrino nodes in either the October release or the April release of the core node software, but until then you'll be relying on the small number of btcd nodes that support it

[Rath_]

Does it worth the time and the energy to start again with a Raspberry PI? (I have it, I won't use it for anything else, and I don't want to sell it, so if it won't be painfully slow or useless, is there any reason why not to play with it again?)

Using a Raspberry Pi is kinda a bumpy ride. It works well for most of the time, but sometimes, it slows down for no reason. It will be usable if you don't mind waiting another 30 seconds from time to time.

If it's OK to start a node on Raspberry, which one would you recommend?
Is neutrino a working solution now (it was in a really beta state in 2017), or I should attach a HDD to the PI with the blockchain, downloaded previously with a PC, and start a full node?

Most tutorials out there are made for LND which is the only implementation supporting neutrino. Neutrino seems to be working fine since Lightning Lab decided to use it in their mobile mainnet Lightning Network wallet. There's also another light client called Breez available on iOS which also uses neutrino.

[Carlton Banks]

Does it worth the time and the energy to start again with a Raspberry PI? (I have it, I won't use it for anything else, and I don't want to sell it, so if it won't be painfully slow or useless, is there any reason why not to play with it again?)

Using a Raspberry Pi is kinda a bumpy ride. It works well for most of the time, but sometimes, it slows down for no reason.

try giving bitcoind (and your lightning daemon) a positive nice number, e.g.

Code:

nice -n 9 /usr/bin/bitcoind

this tells the linux kernel to de-prioritize CPU cycles that would otherwise be scheduled for a given process. All userland processes have an implicit nice value of zero, which means there's a FIFO style dynamic in the way they are served by the CPU. The range of valid nice values is from 19 (maximally nice) to -20 (not at all nice). htop tells you what nice value is assigned, possibly top will too

this should help to smooth out resource usage on a raspi


another angle is to boot directly from an SSD (and put your swapfile on the SSD also). This might only work on rasPi 3's, cannot remember specifically. The /boot partition can stay on your microSD, as it's not performance contingent, and likely read-only too. You just need to tell the config files in /boot to start the init process from /dev/sda (or whatever device your SSD system disk is)

[bitart]

Thank you guys, that was really helpful!
Now I'll start reading about the changes in LND and I'll try to upgrade my Raspberry to the latest release
(Or I'll start from scratch, maybe it's better)
So at first I don't mind if it will slow down from time to time but if it will happen frequently I know now where to find a nice solution for the problem

[Rath_]

The range of valid nice values is from 19 (maximally nice) to -20 (not at all nice). htop tells you what nice value is assigned, possibly top will too

Isn't it exactly the opposite? I looked up this command on a few websites and they said that setting it to -20 makes the process the most favorable. Thanks for your suggestion. I have already contacted Zand_ and we might give it a shot along with neutrino.