Been ages lying dormant, but I finally got around to trying to get my #lightning node working again.

There is a thing called autopilot which will handle the opening of channels etc if you know to enable it.

No button to do so with #umbrel, had to edit config files that didn't even exist until I created them in the magic places, and reboot.

It opened a channel for me, putting 80 percent of the wallet balance into it.

That means I can send in theory, but still can't receive coz of lack of inbound liquidity.

There's an app for that.

"Loop out" is what they call it. On umbrel you install "lightning terminal", and it has the option to do a loop out.

Loop-out means using your ability to pay with lightning in order to pay someone to do an on-chain transaction that gives you your money back.

I think they say this is "trustless" but :shrug:, I just trusted it anyway and wouldn't have any idea how to check if they were crooks first.

I sent 70% or so of that channel back to myself onchain that way, and then the autopilot opened a second channel.

That gives me a fairly good position in the network. Outbound and inbound liquidity about balanced, multiple connections.

It even did some routing, earning me 5 sats on day one.

The autopilot keeps some of your balance on-chain, since there will be on-chain fees to pay to close channels down and do loop-outs and stuff.

The 5 sats that I earned put me back in the zone of the autopilot have too much capacity so wanting to open channels. It opened a third tiny one that will probably become too small for the fees to close it this bull run. :eyeroll:

With the wallet finally working it was time to go try and buy Lyn Alden's book again.

I scanned the QR code on the site excited to do my first lightning transaction with it,k and only after the transaction was submitted realized I was doing an on-chain transaction anyway. Not a lightning one.

Doh.

Apparently with fees low enough it took 12 hours to confirm too.

But I'm legit with Lyn now. Turns out I needn't have checked I could pirate the book first, it is indeed DRM-free anyway so I can put it on my Remarkable even without having to pirate or break any codes.

There is much more work to be done to get Nostr able to "zap" money back and forth.

I think I have to expose LNBits to the internet somehow first? And my plan of just using a reverse ssh tunnel for that didn't work.

In short: you still gotta be really really keen and geeky to run a lightning node. Even with Umbrel and 30 years industry experince. It's hard.

Still.

Five sats a day.

In only 50 thousand years I'll have a whole bitcoin!