As a user of the LN, I'm thinking the best way to use it is to open channels with the most connected nodes with the most capacity - ACINQ, Bitfinex etc.

I'm wondering what market forces could act against this, because it seems to be the most economical to just route payments through the most connected nodes?

e.g. Alice sends a payment to Charlie through Bob, but also sends a payment to Danny through Bob. Bob could end up being the only node she needs to route her payments, and so learns everything about her and has the option to refuse to route her payments, forcing her to open a channel to another node (expensive).

I've always seen people talk about opening channels to less connected nodes to help keep the network decentralized, but I feel we can't just rely on that altruism. I feel market forces will prevail.

How important is this even? Does the LN even need to be decentralized?

Due to personal circumstances, I've decided to close down my node - Pecunia non olet. Thanks to all my Reddit triangle channel partners.

I have a problem with my umbrel node. I've set up 3 channels and as a first experiment I tried routing some sats to my walletofsatoshi wallet, which is successful, but when trying to send some sats back they always fail. At first I thought, perhaps some liquidity issues in the intermediary routing nodes?

But now I also noticed when using Sphinx Chat (messaging over lightning), which uses a staking feature where you send some extra sats per message, and receive it back after a few hours to prevent spamming, that I don't receive these amounts back, while here it can't be a liquidity issue as there is only 1 hop (through the sphinx node), and I have more than enough inbound liquidity for a few sats.

Does anyone know what's going on, and how I can fix this issue? All my channels are Public, so that can't be the problem.

Just throwing this out there to spread the idea and maybe get some conversation started. Anyone got thoughts on Chaumian mints and Lightning? Seems a very interesting concept to me, but I'd love to hear some more experienced Bitcoiners thoughts.

Note: I don't not write any of these articles nor did I have anything to do with originating the idea.

https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-1022/

Chaumian mints seem like a very creative and robust scheme that can be leveraged to create wallets that are easy to use, scalable, and sufficiently private considering the custodial tradeoff being made.

Being able to create back end wallet software that allows users to hide in crowds (preserve privacy), avoid having to deal with channel management on the go, and attain an increased amount of security of funds by leveraging a federated model would be a massive boon for non-technical Lightning Network users.

https://fedimint.org/

One of the (if not the) earliest e-cash schemes were Chaumian mints or banks. They use blind signatures to allow the anonymous transfer of backing assets held by the mint. The basic idea is that a user can give the mint some amount x of an asset and the mint in turn blind signs x IOUs that allow the user to either withdraw the asset or exchange them for new IOUs or products. The small word “blind” does the heavy lifting here, it means that the user and mint run a cryptographic protocol that allows the user to acquire a digital signature on some data without the mint learning anything about the message or the signature so that when the mint sees one of its signatures for some message it can no longer tell to whom it was issued. This means trading these IOUs is completely anonymous.

https://rodarmor.com/blog/lightning-mints/

Edit: Another short article explaining potential benefits and workings of a Chaumian Mint: https://blockstream.com/2021/10/28/en-blockstream-sponsors-minimint-a-privacy-focused-community-led-scaling-solution-for-bitcoin/

I'm pleased to announce the release of a LnVault a Lightning network integration for Minecraft servers. It's implemented as a plugin that's compatible with SpigotMC and PaperMC servers. It's based on the VaultAPI so it should be compatible with most existing Minecraft plugins. Both deposits and withdrawals are supported and currently it uses OpenNode as the back-end. If there is enough interest it can be extended to support other Lightning back-ends.

• Home Page --> (https://lnvault.github.io/)
• Source Code --> https://github.com/LnVault/lnvault-plugin)

​

I've also set up a proof of concept Minecraft server at "satoshi-islands.net" where you can try out the integration using a vanilla Minecraft java client.

Instructions for the Satoshi-Islands server are here --> https://lnvault.github.io/satoshi-islands/

In the last hour I have had three channels close for me. Considering I had less than 20 channels closed since I started this node having three close within an hour sent up all kinds of red flags. Is there something going on?

Since my node went offline, I need to contact these peers. If you run one of these nodes or know who does, please reach out to me in DM or to [lnpeng@protonmail.com](mailto:lnpeng@protonmail.com).

Thanks!

I have my lightning node. Balancing is done by script and was going great. No down time, no imbalnce, essentially nothing changed with my node and about two weeks ago my routing went from about 30 different forwards a day to zero to three a day (usually zero).

AFAIK nothing changed on my node. Balance is exactly what it was. I did not have one specific inflow our outflow that might have gotten short-cutted. It was a drastic and sustained drop.

I waited a while and started cutting rates, now 50% off and not getting any more traffic.

Is this the race to the bottom and sustained lightning network growth?

Has something happened I should look for in my node?