And I am not trying to suggest you run a node or do anything more than just use the lightning network in the way best for you. I believe fees are going to follow a trajectory much like the price and hashrate has. So doing mining as you do getting used to layer 2 strategies is going to become more and more important.
I apologize for the offtopic, but do you know of any way to run node LN on Windows? I've been looking and haven't found anything that I find interesting.
LND has pre-compiled windows binaries.
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/releases <-- Don't trust my links verify for yourself.
You would need that and a full
BTC node.
With everything figure a full 1TB free on a drive before you start.
Keep in mind you will also need 24/7 uptime for the PC and your internet connection.
And coffee lots of coffee to keep you up while getting it to work.
-Dave
1) I have not set up a node either, but I thought that a potentially good option for running a node on a PC would be the DIY Start9.
https://docs.start9.com/0.3.5.x/diy/diy-x86The DIY Start9 apparently runs on Linux, Windows or MacOS...
@cAPSLOCK Have you run one of these? or some variation of it? on your hardware or on their hardware?
2) @Phillip1957. In your several posts starting out this thread, there are several times that you are using the terms custodial versus non-custodial incorrectly.
I don't like those custodial/non-custodial terms either and I find them confusing (which is also probably the case with an overwhelming number of bitcoin newbies - and you are not even a newbie and you are not using the terms correctly.... and I am not even blaming you for that because they are confusing).
In any event, in order to lessen some of the ambiguity, I tend to use the term third-party custodial (to refer to custodial) and Self-custodial to refer to non-custodial.. We likely know that another ambiguous term that has been coming up is hosted versus unhosted wallets, in order to try to normalize third party custodial as if self-custody (or non-custodial or unhosted) was a bad thing.. and the fact of the matter is that the use of confusing terms is likely an attack vector on bitcoin and an attack on ideas of self-custodial, which everyone has rights to be able to custody his own money, information and value and to have privacy over these kinds of matters..
3)
This website strives to categorize and describe several lightning network wallets in terms of custodial and non-custodial, and I personally have ONLY used Cash App (Custodial), Bluewallet (the custodial version of lightning network that they used to have), Breez (non-custodial - but had my channel force closed), and Phoenix (non-custodial and I have been using it since February/March 2023 - but have probably ONLY done fewer than 20 transactions with it).
I personally believe that it is not too much work to set up something like a Phoenix wallet, and you can store the 12 words, and you can also do a cloud backup, but I don't do that. The set up fees are a bit higher right now, and last week, they were like 30k to 50k satoshis because of onchain fees. They are now coming down to between 15k and 25k satoshis in the last few days, and maybe will be able to set up for less than 10k satoshis in the near future? Once the channel is open, then if you are using it every month, you will probably find it easier to use, and less concerns about using the (third-party) custodial services that you are currently exploring with nice hash, kraken and others that you are looking into. I have not tried to set up any Electrum wallet (or to use lighting network in that way), so I don't have that level of experience, so far... but like you, I am working on various ways to try to increase my exposure to various lightning network applications/wallets and to try to learn more about ways that I might be able to use them to have more options during sometimes uncertain fee times that still seems to be our current on-chain situation.
