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spending, maybe providing an uncle sam node for friends and family when shit hits the fan.

In that case I would recommend fewer large channels to some large nodes. That will cut down on the number of jumps you need for routing and they will be more reliable in terms of uptime and successful routing.

You shouldn't need to rebalance channels if you're not a routing node. All you'll need to worry about is having enough outgoing liquidity if you spend more than you receive. You can refill your channels by paying your own invoice with Strike or other LN enabled exchange, or just close drained channels and open a new one. As long as you're spending more than you receive you will always have enough incoming liquidity without going out of your way to get it.

I ran a routing node for about a year and I can tell you it wasn't really worth it at small scale. I eventually shut it down and intended to start a node for personal use, but I found Phoenix works fine for my needs so I'm not planning on it for now. It was a good experience though. If you have any questions fire away.

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Discussion

d0enakalle🐇⚡ 2y ago

That's a fantastic answer (thank you very much!) that also disappoints me because I've originally liked the idea of routing and doing my part for the network... 😅 But your points sound quite convincing, I gotta admit. Maybe I'll say goodbye to the idea of routing and let the professionals do it.

BUT YOU WON'T MAKE ME STOP HOMEMINING, OKAY?! ;)

Crizzo 2y ago

You're welcome 😁

Yeah I can't recommend routing to anyone that's wanting to do it casually. Even a small routing node requires a lot of attention and you'll likely not make a profit. You really need a lot of technical skills to pull it off, like writing scripts that automate things or analyze the network to find channel opportunities that might be lucrative. Just opening random channels to plebs doesn't really cut it (that's mostly what I did).

I didn't lose much, but that was also when I could open channels for 1 sat/vb. The random force closures are what really killed it for me though. I would have a force closure cost me a few thousand sats and at the rate I was routing it would take a month to recover it, then I'd have another 2 weeks later.

I was also worried about my own reliability running on a ras pi with potentially not perfect internet. I'm sure some force closures were my fault too. They only happen when a payment gets stuck somehow (don't know the exact details), so it shouldn't be a problem with private channels that don't constantly have transactions flowing on them.

Also, I don't think I was even much use to the network. A lot of the activity was other nodes using me to rebalance their own channels. If I turned up fees I wouldn't route anything, and when they were low I couldn't keep my channels balanced because everyone around me was charging higher fees and rebalancing wasn't economical. All I felt like I was doing was subsidizing more successful nodes.

Anyway that's the story in case you needed more convincing not to mess with routing 😅