Yo my guy how are you, everything good?
Yadayadayada just wondering if lightning is better then blahxmrblah blah coin. Then why dont dnm use lightning? Just wondering 🤔
Discussion
Everything is good
Some DNMs do use lightning
Cost of channels to setup probably the biggest obstacle I'm guessing? Would put alot of onus on the DNM creator to pony up more significant funds in order to run a lightning node with a few channels etc.
You don't need to open up any channels. People who want to pay you or route traffic to you will open up channels *to* you if they think they will benefit from doing so.
But if you *do* decide to open up channels, they are pretty cheap to acquire. Here is a list of channel sellers so you can see the different prices out there: https://supertestnet.github.io/list-of-channel-sellers/
The cheapest one I see is from user xmrk at this website: https://liquiditystr.space/
He is selling a channel with inbound capacity of 1 million sats, or about $1,000, for 894 sats, less than $1.
Awesome! Ty heaps for the info! Didnt know about liquiditystr 🤙
Yo Super. Good to see you. Do you recommend any resources to learn more about channels? I still have questions like these to this day.
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> My questions now are: 1. Are there any nodes that that specialize in opening small channels?
Here is a list of channel sellers: https://supertestnet.github.io/list-of-channel-sellers/
I am particularly excited about liquiditystr, which is a frontend that lets you explore liquidity ads created by users of some FOSS LSP software. 4 people are currently running that software and advertising channel sales, with the cheapest option being a channel with 1 million sats of inbound capacity (about $1000) for a cost of under 900 sats (less than $1).
> 2. What are the major concerns/factors that affect who you open a channel with?
- Cost of the channel
- Duration of service
- Reliable uptime
- Good connections
- Success of payments
- Privacy policy
> 3. Are there any privacy considerations?
Yes. Your channel counterparty gets to see some data about transactions that you are involved in, if they pass through his or her node. He or she gets to see partial amount info, partial fee info, timing info, payment hashes that might be linkable to you, and he or she gets to see that your node is the next hop on the route or, if you are the sender, they get to see that you are the prior hop on the route.
Ideally, your LSP should have a nondisclosure policy, a habit of regularly deleting this data, and no means of contacting them, that way nothing can be subpoena'd from them. If an LSP does not seem to publish a privacy policy but DOES have a way to contact them, consider asking them to publish a privacy policy and to disable their contact form.
> 4. Is 21K enough to do anything?
I'm not sure what you mean by "anything." If you mean "is there anything I can buy for 21k sats?" then yes, that's worth about $20 so you can buy a gift card with it from bitrefill, for example. It's also plenty for the kind of lightning work I do, which is mostly experimental. But if you're a heavy lightning user and spend your coins often, you'll probably run out of outbound capacity pretty fast and have to frequently top up your lightning wallet, which could be annoying. In that case, I would get a bigger channel of at least 200k sats.
> My goal is just to open a small channel to start testing BOLT12 payouts from @OCEAN
It seems to me that a channel with 21k sats of inbound capacity would be fine for such tests.
Thanks Super. I guess I just need to mess around a bit more.
I’m particularly interested in number 3. Know of anything out there that dives deeper into all of that?
It sounds like Lightning channel communication exposes data and I wonder if NWC is similar. For example, I see my Alby Hub doing a lot of communication (I’m assuming with the Alby relay), but I don’t quite know what’s going on and what data is out there.
The following chapter from Lightning Provacy goes into some detail on what data routing nodes and LSPs can log: https://lightningprivacy.com/en/routing-analysis
I don't know of any analyses about the privacy implications of NWC. I suppose a relay could log how often you communicate with your node via that relay and what size your messages are, which may sometimes tell them what command you are using.
Hmm...I think this would be easy to mitigate via message padding, which should be quite practical because NWC messages are just enceypted json, so you can add fields that don't do anything and pad all messages to a fixed length with no downsides. Hey, I think that's a pretty good idea. Thank you for making me think of it!
Thanks man! I’ll add it to my reading list. 🫡
My guy 🫡