In good conscience I have to chime in on this post. It's awesome the revenue that Derek is making, but for anyone thinking about standing up a routing node, the majority of nodes won't be profitable. There are cost associated to open channels, rebalancing, and most of all, force closes.

Here are my routing stats for approximately 5 months. What it doesn't show is that I'm around 150,000 sats in the red. Running a lightning node, in my opinion, is a great education in Bitcoin and contribution to the resiliency of the Lightning network. But save for the really large nodes, many won't be profitable.

Take that for what it's worth. I'm my mind the sats that I've "lost" aren't a loss at all but the best education/experience I've had in the space.