I enjoy running a node for a lot of reasons, but I am always honest with people who want to do it that it’s not a way to generate income, and it’s not without a steep learning curve.

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you’re much better off just setting it up as an nostr:npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm Hub which doesn’t require much maintenance.

If you really want to go all in, you should plan to spend a few hundred bucks on a decent used mini PC with a faster processor and plenty of disk space.

For most people who just want to use Lightning and not run their own hardware, there are a bunch of decent options.

Even Alby Cloud, which is a fantastic, all-inclusive option should be thoroughly considered before jumping in. Once the intro price goes away, you're dealing with a 21k sat fee, which at today's prices is close to $21USD per month.

If you're someone who is new to Lightning, or a casual user who isn't transacting hundred of thousands of sats per month, you really have to ask yourself if such an expense can be justified.

Don't get me wrong, people who have technical aptitude, and a significant transaction volume should absolutely consider hosting their own node and/or using Alby Hub. But I think we might be discouraging the use of custodial or even non-custodial wallets when they could be better solutions for a lot of people.

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I am talking about the free version that you can run on almost any kind of computer.

💯 and I use nostr:npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm Hub. I also built a node. But the PITA factor of it outweighed the be your own bank factor.

The price will adjust to the increased purchasing power of bitcoin.

We will also have a blog post coming up talking about the learnings when trying to live on a bitcoin standard.

As it should 😊