Lightning channel management is just a pain in the ass. Trying to move liquidity around and steer it in the direction you want it to go is a full time job.
Discussion
What tools can be used to automate this work?
Rebalance-lnd by Carsten Otto is really good but it’s still a pain to manage channels
Yeah its not easy to do. I used to try and rebalace all the time but gave up and just left it with dynamic fees. It works okish but my channels are far from balanced.
Someone please train an AI to do it
You can already auto-rebalance. Set your parameters and start a cronjob.
Agreed. It can be a chore especially when you're a merchant.
This is why I just use custodial lightning solutions. Let that be someone else’s problem. Unpopular, but I don’t believe custodial spending wallets are as haram as everyone believes they are.
For maybe a few weeks I thought I'd try and build a routing node, but that did not last very long. Better to leave that to the pros imo. Just create a few liquidity swaps on #[2] and a fat channel to a vendor you pay a lot, and be done with it.
Looking forward to this being far more automated and the UI flow being that much smoother.
One day: Deposit bitcoin on a node, then the node does the rest. Instant self-hosted lightning liquidity.
So is the lighting network imperfect? If it is, we shouldn't pollute bitcoin's perfection.. maybe it's not the solution
Nothing is perfect.
You're right, bitcoin seems to have 1 sole imperfection, that is the scalability problem. Or, it appears to be a problem.
Let's say that bitcoin is the closest thing to perfect that humans have ever been able to come up with. Also, isn't it the only human-made thing with the potential to last forever?
It's worth it for anyone interested in really learning how it all works, and there are some tools to help automate some of it, but yeah- it's a lot of work.
I use LNDg, but it still requires manual intervention.
You can completere auto pilot it. But I'm not brave enough for that.
Ok. I switched autopilot on. Let it run for a week. See what happens. 🙈
Let us know how it goes 🙏
Autopilot for a week. It enabled some channels for rebalancing. You have to adjust your otarget% yourself and the fee you want to pay for rebalancing. The channel rebalancing success rate was around 80% for those channels. I keep it going some time longer.
Thanks for the update! It sounds like it's actually a viable way to manage your channels with little oversight. I might have to give it another go soon 🤓
You could try Torq, you can manage your channels, do rebalancing and more
I currently use LNDg. Thanks. I haven't heard that tool. I'll check it out.
It mentions it is a tool for large lightning network nodes. How many channels do you consider defines a big node.
I find liquidity balancing tedious and time consuming.
Good question I know that some of the people that use it have like 100+ channels but it can be used with less
I just set fees 0/0 and let the cards fall where they may. Funnily enough, I do see some traffic, where channel use my router to rebalance for free, but it’s definitely not a Sat making proposition.
Indeed, I've done all of that too and stopped. Reballancing channels is a pain in the ass. Also when BOLT12 on LND?
True. I admit I've been running both a full bitcoin node and a lightning node for some years now. But I've never setup channels on the lightning node. I mainly just use Strike. 🤷♂️
Life hack is try to get 2:1 inbound liquidity to outbound, then things are always flowing
So much inbound? Isn’t that too much? Means too less outbound?
I imagine there a no Sats that can flow
Puts a lot of demand on your outbound sats
Anyway…. Zapped ⚡️⚡️
Indeed. Additionally those fee sats spent never will be back😂
It is. I had lightning node running for a year, but I got frustrated with whole experience so I closed all channels and just use a mobile wallet for occasional transactions.
I am loving the similarities between managing liquidity on lightning channels and managing the flow of electrons on power grids.
I wonder how long it will take to be equally as important?
Main reason I stopped running my own node. Now using noncustodial Phoenix wallet for all my lightning needs. Still run umbrel for bitcoin/electrs for hodl nunchuck/cc wallet. Future bitcoin adoption will be mostly mobile
Check out Voltage's Flow 2.0, announced yesterday. It's a solid step in the direction of automating all that (: