The Lightning Network node experience

[Rath_]

You say this month, but we are January.

Of course your attached chart seems to show December information.. presumably the whole month.... in which it looks like you had a lot of activity in the first two days and then on the 7th but other than that you did not have a lot of activity.  Can you elaborate upon the meaning/interpretation a bit more?

Oh, I wrote that post on the 31st December and I meant to publish it on the very same day. "This month" obviously refers only to December and not January.

Two out of seven of my channels are used mostly for outgoing payments. On the 7th December, both of these channels became extremely unbalanced. I can route only a few thousand satoshi through them now. Once I rebalance them via circular payments, my node should start routing payments again (I have been getting a lot of failed attempts due to no liquidity since that day). I also need to adjust my feerate in those channels based on the rebalancing fee so that I can make a profit or at least don't lose any money.

[1714149251]

1714149251

[1714149251]

1714149251

[1714149251]

1714149251

[ir.hn]

This is just an observation and not an attack, but Lightning network seems like Quantum computer Shor's, always just around the corner but until now vastly surpassed by conventional technologies (conventional computers/large blocksize).

My suggestion is use the server to mine raptoreum and you will make at least 100x lightning fees.

[n0nce]

This is just an observation and not an attack, but Lightning network seems like Quantum computer Shor's, always just around the corner but until now vastly surpassed by conventional technologies (conventional computers/large blocksize).

My suggestion is use the server to mine raptoreum and you will make at least 100x lightning fees.

Your whole post is off-topic, and I also don't understand what you want to tell us with it.

Nobody runs a Lightning Node to make money, and most of us here are especially uninterested in a random shitcoin whose name I suppose raptoreum is. One of the reasons is that Lightning fees are supposed to be low; that's the entire idea: fast, cheap Bitcoin payments with the security of normal Bitcoin transactions at almost no cost.

In theory, in the future if you route thousands or millions of these a day, even tiny fees could sum up to amounts that can cover the energy requirement for running that node. However, merchants and other entities might have other motivations to run a well-connected node. In the example of online- (or offline) shops, the motivation of running such a node would be that you won't have issues with customers not finding a route to your node and unable to pay. This alone would be enough for the merchant, and if they make 1 or 2 dollars a month extra through routing fees, that just goes on top.

[Rath_]

My suggestion is use the server to mine raptoreum and you will make at least 100x lightning fees.

As n0nce has said, I am not really doing it to make a ton of money. If that were the case, I would open far many more (large) channels.

so instead of emphasising the 31cent 'energy cost' mention the $3 confirmation lock cost to peg into ln and the $3 cost to unpeg out of LN ($6 to use LN before even doing any 'payments')

You seem to be stuck in 2017/2018. Transaction fees have been extremely low for quite some time now. Even 1 sat/vbyte is enough to get a transaction confirmed quickly. The smallest possible opening transaction with change weights ~152 vbytes (transaction; channel). The cost of that transaction was only $0.07.

[n0nce]

First of all, it seems franky1 is banned from the this subforum, so his post and replies to his posts might get deleted. Seems like they have a point when they say he consistently posts misinformation.

You seem to be stuck in 2017/2018. Transaction fees have been extremely low for quite some time now. Even 1 sat/vbyte is enough to get a transaction confirmed quickly. The smallest possible opening transaction with change weights ~152 vbytes (transaction; channel). The cost of that transaction was only $0.07.

The cool thing is that not only does a transaction often just cost a few cents (single digits) when sent at 1 sat/vbyte; you can even open multiple channels in a single transaction. So you kinda pay once for two channels (however a bit more due to a larger transaction size).

[Rath_]

you can even open multiple channels in a single transaction. So you kinda pay once for two channels (however a bit more due to a larger transaction size).

In case someone still doesn't know, both c-lightning and LND can open multiple channels in a single transaction. The former has a dedicated command to it and the latter requires you to construct such a transaction manually. Mobile wallets users are out of luck for now.

[Rath_]

Here are the stats for January. One of my largest channels, which I opened with some other bitcointalk user, was offline for at least half a month. Some of the routed payments were free of charge as I wanted to rebalance two of my channels this way.

[darkv0rt3x]

I should say I haven't been very active changing fees to meet the new balances after a couple of forwardings. Maybe that is also holding my node a bit back. My node is not very big either. I think only around 0.06BTC of incoming liquidity, so I think it's kinda reasonable that my routing is not that good!

[Rath_]

New record! 647.73 satoshi in fees collected from 60 transactions in February. A few days ago, I opened a dual-funded channel with @n0nce and it turned out to be the right call. We routed 41 transactions in a single day!

[n0nce]

New record! 647.73 satoshi in fees collected from 60 transactions in February. A few days ago, I opened a dual-funded channel with @n0nce and it turned out to be the right call. We routed 41 transactions in a single day!

Hell yeah! I bet if you rebalance your channels a bit, it can continue.
Seems like there is big demand to send from some of my peers to some of yours, but I'm almost out of outbound liquidity in our channel.

[Rath_]

March doesn't look good in comparison to other months. My Internet connection was unstable for over half a month and my node was down for a couple of days. I managed to fix it around the 26th and it took about 3 days before I started seeing routing attempts again.



On a positive note, my node routed 6 transactions today and I earned 351.58 satoshi. April looks promising!

[n0nce]

On a positive note, my node routed 6 transactions today and I earned 351.58 satoshi. April looks promising!

Probably has nothing to do with me rebalancing our channel earlier yesterday.

[Rath_]

Probably has nothing to do with me rebalancing our channel earlier yesterday.

Oh, now I see that 4 of those transactions were sent from your side. How many times did you rebalance our channel?

[n0nce]

Probably has nothing to do with me rebalancing our channel earlier yesterday.

Oh, now I see that 4 of those transactions were sent from your side. How many times did you rebalance our channel?

Once; the rest were probably routed payments.

[darkv0rt3x]

Hi. Once more I leave my results. Not much activity here either. Last couple of weeks I saw 2 channels closed. One from a Ring of Fire (without any apparent reason nor warning, ) and another from a damaged channel database from LightningWatch node.

And from what I can see, I might be using very low fees in my outgoing channels. I might have to go for another run changing some fees.

[n0nce]

Here are my March stats..
I need to rebalance often, so I'll have a look into adding another channel soon that might help 'route the other way round' more & keep channels more balanced.



@darkv0rt3x you seem to collect a lot of fees! What are your fee rates?

[Rath_]

@darkv0rt3x you seem to collect a lot of fees! What are your fee rates?

Fee rates are publicly available information as they are needed for pathfinding. You can check his settings using any Lightning explorer. It's pretty straightforward on both  1ml.com and amboss.space; you just need to scroll down a little.

[darkv0rt3x]

Here are my March stats..
I need to rebalance often, so I'll have a look into adding another channel soon that might help 'route the other way round' more & keep channels more balanced.



@darkv0rt3x you seem to collect a lot of fees! What are your fee rates?

I would prefer to have less failed routing attempts, both local_failed and failed and less fees collected, than the actual situation. I change fees every now and then, but my thumbs up rule is something like base = 90msat ~ 120msat and ppm = depends on the other peer. If I know it's a peer with more traffic, I usually set them a bit higher to easy up on lower amount transfers. I mean, to make smaller transactions cheaper and bigger transactions a bit more expensive. Also, I set both base and ppm values quite high for channels with more incoming capacity so that I try to channel activity more for outgoing channels. But sometimes, I have the idea that this takes no role. For instance, my best channel so far is with Boltz node. And usually, it doesn't matter if I have high fees on this channel because it keeps forwarding payments in AND out.

[Rath_]

Here are the statistics for April.

I still haven't set up any auto-balancing/auto-fee-adjusting plugin. I don't think it would make that much of a difference. Some of my channels are set to route payments free of charge and they remain silent. I guess that I am at a point where opening new channels could help a lot but I don't really want to do it at this moment.

[n0nce]

I rebalanced a few times with the rebalance plugin; a few times manually and also multiple times with the lightning-cli rebalanceall method.
This kept my channels more balanced and active throughout the month, but somehow I earn less than you guys.