I had this question, too, and more. Oktober 2023 wasn't bad either, while seemingly out of nothing March '24 plummets deeply.
There is a simple reason. March was a month that I barely played with my node. I think that is one of the most important reason.
darkv0rt3x said earlier that he doesn't unfortunately keep track of expenses for rebalancing. I would really like to know if there's a correlation between effort to rebalance and if it pays off with more routing fees. And particularly if you don't have to spend more for rebalancing as you get in return for collecting routing fees, obviously.
I think there are 2 important reasons to make smaller nodes be able to route a bit more. Play a lot with fees, at least daily, and if it gets your node more active, rebalancing. And by rebalancing I don't mean put all your channels 50/50 (in/out) liquidity. I'll explain more in the next quote.
Another of my personal details of interest is change in number of channels and channel size. Has there been any substantial changes which resulted in the increase of routing fees?
To complete the reply to the above quote and also this quote, my experience is not highly conclusive but I have the idea that if you spend some time thinking in ways of theoretically widespread your node in terms of connections, it may pay off.
I cannot talk too much about the size of the channels because I don't have that big channels. the biggest channel I have open right now by me is 2.5M sats. I had one of 3M sats in the past but I closed it.
But one thing I tried recently was to talk to a good peer owner I have and ask him what are his best peers. He gave me a list of a few of his best peers and I chose one of them (not the biggest not the smallest, some peer in the middle), went to amboss.space and looked to the channels of that peer and searched for one peer that didn't have any channels to the peer I was talking to and opened a channel to that peer. It payed off because I could route 2M sats of payments in like a week. Problem was that I had the fees too low and I end up paying more for rebalancing than what I got in fees.
Not sure I was clear about the above explanation but I'll try this way.
My peer is A. So, I talked to the peer with which I have the best routing channels. This peer is peer B. I asked peer B what are his best peers in terms of routing to him (peer B). I told me that peers C to, let's say H, are his best peers.
I looked to the size of this list of peers and chose one that was not too big nor too small. Too big peers like ACINQ or WoS or so, tend to deplete our channels too quickly and too expensive to rebalance. So I went to a mid sized one. LEt's say peer F.
Then, I went to Amboss.space and looked to the channels of peer F and searched of a peer within peer's F peers that didn't have any channel to peer B and opened a channel to that peer! What I wanted to do was to make my node to be a bridge between peer B and peer F which has a "connection/channel" to one of best peer B peers. Hope you got the idea!
However, I would completely understand if darkv0rt3x prefers not to make such details public.
No problem, peers are public once you have their Pub Key.
Meanwhile, in late 2023 I closed my few own managed channels of my RaspiBlitz LND node. For some time my channels served me the purpose I opened them for. I had some personal usage and I wanted to experiment a little and see if and how I could manage coin flow for rebalancing purposes. It didn't work out well enough. I'm sure it were too few channels, too small size of channels and with too few channel partners you would have to be exceptionally lucky to have chosen channel partners that could provide you lots of routing opportunities. I knew I couldn't expect any good traffic despite my own transfer needs.
My node pub key is 03fef777d58a529df02a3fb267690e0c9033767b555cc1c63844bb2d3498789f91. You can take a look at Amboss.space and have an idea of the size of my channels and node. It's a small node. In total, I have around 0.34BTC in + out liquidity. My outbound is only around 9M sats. Inbound 25M sats.
I take the learning experience with me which I don't want to miss. I'm sure I still don't understand quite some settings, especially to enhance and support coin flow in desirable direction for as cheap as possible channel rebalancing. (My experience with circular payments was almost always a too expensive one, compared to return of interest through subsequent routing.)
I think that's common with smaller nodes. I'm there too, but it's not a fortune that we can lose in terms of routing fees versus rebalancing spendings. And with some luck you may even get on green.
Comercial noeds, let's call them that way, is probably way easier to get good income from routing and from the services they provide themselves.
My experiment had limits and I didn't want to lock more than a few million sats of liquidity for it. I don't complain...
Yeah, understandable. I have my node since around 2019. In Amboss.space, the oldest channel doesn't reflect my node's age because my oldest channel was with Boltz but due to some issues (probably stuck HTLCs in flight) that cannel was force-closed long ago. In fact, I have had like 3 of 4 channels with Boltz that were force-closed due to stuck HTLCs or HTLCs not resolved in due time!
