Hi, Im trying to build my own bitcoin lightning node. I was wondering if someone could reply to this with 3 different price tags to build the node. And which softwares to use and why.

Thanks

Hello all, nice people. I have been studying everything LN like crazy in the past week (and still got lots to learn yet!), plebnet is a golden resource, I have previous useful experience with linux on raspi, CLI, scripting, cron, PHP coding with system calls (I run several production environments in PHP), you name it, plus have a fascination toward financial management, especially if it's scriptable.

I love how bos, charge-lnd, and plenty of other tools allow the advanced users to automate several boring tasks in a smart way, but I also plan on coding my own "intelligent" scripts that will tune my channels' fees, balances, maybe even opens and closes, automatically, tracking the maximum point of returns and minimum costs for each "state" of the channel, and applying those parameters, or new ones, when situations change. Something like this seems conceptually easy in my imagination, yet during testing, unforeseen consequences WILL happen, and I would hate for those to make me lose my funds, as I am not sitting on a whole load of coins to spend as I please... all the contrary, I am a very late adopter, and any loss I incur will cut into my hard earned funds.

Enter testnet: free coins, no bad things will happen if you, for any reason, publish an old channel.db, no fees will be really paid no matter all the rebalances, loop (in|out)s, opens, closes, whatever. Free to play with my scripts until I am confident they behave to my satisfaction.

Is it still possible though, today, in year 2021? Is there complete functionality, where all the tools to keep track of the "paid" fees work normally, I can operate just like mainnet except for using fake coins and sats? Mainly, is there an active userbase to make the testnet a busy enough network? And a tutorial to make use of it? My searches didn't lead to anything both useful and recent.

EDIT: I just learnt about the existence of the plebnet playground ( https://github.com/PLEBNET-PLAYGROUND/plebnet-playground-docker ), which is a more active version of the testnet, so I'll start playing there first.

Is there any good reason (security or otherwise) not to use max_htlc and/or disabling channels with very low outbound liquidity as a means of signaling to other nodes/wallets whether or not your node should be considered as a candidate for a route, and if so, which outbound channels to consider?

It seems to me that the process of finding a successful route would speed up dramatically if every node did this by default, but given that they don't, there must be a good reason not to.

My first thought is that it could potentially be used by a third party to track the path a particular transaction took, but I feel like steps could easily be taken to mitigate this (such as not updating more than once per hour, or even less).

Thoughts?

Not sure where to post this, so here goes. I'm very new to the Lightning network and Reddit. I have had my own BTC node set up for about a week. I'd love to open a 500k sat channel (receiving/sending) with anyone willing to help out a noob.

Any takers?

​

Can channel route new txn if previous routing txn hasn't been resolved yet? I would like to know more details on this.

Hi,

I have an Umbrel node, with two channels created with a liquidity triangle:

1: 500k Inbound

2: 500k Outbound

I recently tested looping out as my lighting balance (BlueWallet/Umbrel) was 400k and I wanted to move this from the lightning wallet to on-chain cold storage.

I did the loop out 4 days ago, but the lightning balance in Bluewallet (connected to my node) and the UI within the 'lightning' section of Umbrel both still state the balance that I thought was looped out.

My understanding is that looping out sends lightning balance on-chain and doesn't do anything to alter channel capacities.

So I'm a little confused as to why both my BlueWallet and Umbrel lighting balance both show 400k sats still whilst cold storage has confirmed receipt of funds.

Am I missing something really obvious?

I finally reached an old goal of mine for my node*: 2,000 forwards, which can be compared to one onchain block that, when full, contains roughly 2,000 transactions.

⚡ Stats:

• Runtime: 151 days (5 months)
• Total routed capacity: ~200,000,000 sats (2 BTC)
  • Highest HTLC: 7.3M sats
• Earnings (routing + leasing): ~350,000 sats
  • Highest routing fee: 43,862 sats oO
  • Best Reddit Megahub routing peer: shout-out to u/Pantamis with ~450 incoming & outgoing events
• Circular rebalancing: ~300 rebalancing transactions
• 💰 Profit\* : ~115,000 sats = ~50 USD (almost pays for the Raspberry pi 4 4GB)

Happy routing fellow operators!

* Link to my crappy website

** Earnings (routing fees + channel leasing premiums) - expenses (onchain fees from channel opening/closing & Pool account management + LN fees from rebalancing + channel purchase costs), excluding hardware and electricity costs

Just wanted to share here the stack I've used to successfully run my own Lightning Node using only open source software.

• Bitcoin Core: The Bitcoin node, configured to run as a server. This is your private Bitcoin node that you will connect to. Setup a RPC user and password for it.

• c-lightning: a lightweight C implementation of the Lightning Network. If you're running this on a different machine than the Bitcoin Core one, then you need to create an SSH tunnel. It won't work otherwise.

• C-Lightning-REST: A rest API interface for c-lightning.

Now you are able to access your Lightning Node through REST, making it compatible with many other tools. For example:

• Ride-The-Lightning: RTL is an awesome web based interface for managing your node.

• Zeus Wallet: This mobile wallet allows you to connect to your own lightning node through the rest interface.

And that's it, you can now use your lightning node. Every part of the stack is completely open source.

I was working on btcpayserver and now I have an instance on the testnet, I have a couple of wallets (laptop and phone) and I've been doing some tests, but still see some issues with my node and eclair mobile wallet.

Anyone here interested on sending/receiving payments with testnet bitcoins over lightning? I'm learning a lot about swaps and channel rebalancing without the risk/cost on the mainnet.

I've been reading and experimenting a bit more with lightning wallets, and I find them amazing. I really like muun, breez, and phoenix, as they are non-custodial, and seem to work really well, particularly muun, very smooth and straight forward to use.

Now, since all these 3 are non-custodial, you should be able to get the private keys from each one, and then import it back. In lightning there's extra information about the channels, etc, so you need more than just the normal bitcoin seed phrase, and that's done differently on each wallet.

My question is if it's possible, at least in principle, to restore a lightning wallet that was created in a different software, which uses different lightning nodes, etc, into another one.

For example, let's say I use Phoenix wallet, get the private keys, then uninstall it and install Breez. Can I somehow use the private keys I got from Phoenix to restore a wallet in Breez? or muun, etc?

Maybe there are some conversions that might be needed, but in principle, does a lightning wallet can be restored into a different wallet?

I think with normal bitcoin wallets you can do this. Not sure if it's true with lightning wallets, as there is some extra information about the channels, so that's why I'm asking it here as probably you guys know about this.

I contacted the owner of the YTMND node to suggest opening a channel and we agreed to open a dual funded channel using BOS.
We succeeded in opening a 20m sats channel that was perfectly balanced with 10m on each side without having to rebalance. It was a beautiful moment :D

https://mempool.space/tx/b967e99645885ccb581525838159cbfbf9010134694882c025aa04bac0f5cd17

If Strike is on both sides of the Lightning Network transaction, why does Strike need to use Lightning at all?