I thought this as well but again if it’s only 10k it’s not much of a risk to have to close in the first place, right? I’m still learning but I’ve noticed lots of connected nodes require locking up hundreds of thousands of sats. I just want to help the new nodes get connected.
Discussion
The thing is, a channel is actually just an UTXO. You don't want to create UTXOs that are of very low value, because depending on how high the onchain fees are, it might be economically unviable to move the funds in the future.
On chain fees are calculated by the amount of data that gets written to the blockchain, and not by the amount of the UTXO.
If you have a channel that is only 10k sats, you might pay 10-30% fees to close the channel later. If the channel is 100k, that would be 1-3%
. If it's 1M, it's 0.1-0.3%.
these numbers are nit exact, but i hope you get what i mean
I do now, thank you. I understand UTXOs so comparing it to a lightning channel makes perfect sense to me now.
The reality is that channels under 1M sats are much more likely to be liquidity bottlenecks. It's better to go bigger than that, if you can manage it, since it'll give you more breathing room to properly manage that liquidity.
Good liquidity management goes pretty far in getting others connected.
Thank you for the advice. Right now my largest channel is 500k. I’ll work on bumping that up.
I'm saying that assuming you were thinking of routing some payments, is that right?
Otherwise if 'others' means family members then there are less capital intensive ways to get them onboarded.
Yeah I’d like to get more people to run nodes, spin up lightning and get connected to a few channels that will only cost a couple hundred USD, and get them to be able to send and receive lightning payments. The most frustrating thing about lightning and unsuccessful payments after putting so much time and Sats into learning L2. But it looks like you get that, your software looks fantastic.
If it's just for experimentation with family and friends, then you can set up a private, trusted zero-conf channel from your node to their Blixt wallet, for example. That way nothing hits the chain and they can have a 10k sat channel. When they're done just abandon the channel from your node and coordinate with them to pay you back the money they spent.