Nostr Web Client

Lol exactly! Same here. I ran my own routing node for a year. There are absolutely valid and good reasons for doing so, and should the need arise again I would, but if the only reason for doing it is to receive zaps then the risks have to be weighed against the benefits, and the risks include the individual technical abilities of the person running the node. I know many people who I would NEVER suggest running their own routing node because they’d lose everything 😂

Sedj 2y ago

My thoughts after running for a while, might not have been a full year, but at least 6 months, were that I was not seeing enough routing fees to make it worth risking my bitcoin, and that in order to be competitive, even within the hobby nodes in Pleb-whatever, I would need to put significantly more bitcoin at risk than I wanted to, especially on raspi hardware which is basically a hobby science kit.

If I were a multi-coiner, maybe having a full coin or more in Lightning would be fine, but that wasn't my reality - but that's what I'm competing with for routing.

I did come up with a two-node lightning design that should effectively de-KYC my bitcoin, and spinning up two nodes to make it work is as simple as harvesting some old laptops from my junk bin, or even better, someone else's junk bin.

I also almost lost a full channel in a database recovery nightmare that happened around a system upgrade, and that was the final straw. Took weeks to recover it, with lots of help from the guy that built the recovery tools, and even then it seemed more luck than anything else that saved me. This wasn't a test channel, it was millions of sats.

And then there are the opsec risks... Tor by itself is an opsec risk...

Yeah - anyway, it has to stay simple, and the custodial models are just fine (in my opinion) for amounts of sats you would be comfortable losing. If you're not comfortable losing it, it should probably be on chain in at least a hot wallet, no need for lighting channels, liquidity issues, lightning nodes, etc.

But yes, every household should eventually run a BITCOIN node. It is just as easy as running an Alexa or a Nest or whatever, and it doesn't have to be a huge security leak! If the reality of running a lightning node becomes as risk-free and easy as running a Bitcoin node, then fine - but that isn't true today, and probably won't be true for another halving cycle if ever. I would actually rather run a Nostr relay or Simplex smp server than run lightning channels.

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