LiGhtNInG iS oNly FoR mIcrOpAyMentS
But 5M, 10M or even 20M sat routings are becoming commonplace as the network matures. At least a few times a week I am seeing these types of payments pass through my node.⚡️
The largest this month was 24M sats in a single payment, for which I earned 31,081 sats in routing fees (1295ppm).
#lightning network #noderunners #nodestrich 
Man maybe I should have deployed some liquidity to exchanges
It works well, but it’s not exactly passive. First you need big enough routes in place to catch this size HTLCs. And you have to be pretty proactive to get liquidity where it needs to be which is costly and time consuming as well. So catching a nice forward like this is great but it’s only part of the story!
do you actively rebalance or just let the sats flow?
I actively rebalance certain channels– The key to lightning is putting liquidity where it is needed in the network. Especially routes to/from exchanges can be high volume but in one direction only. If you don’t manually replenish them they won’t route.
Awesome. Those are some big HTLCs. How difficult is it for you to readjust after such a big sloshing of liquidity?
I only have a couple channels with enough liquidity for that size HTLCs but many that can handle 5-10M easily. It depends on the channel, but it can take a week or two to move things back around and get liquidity where it needs to be again.
That’s huge! Great work. Thanks for sharing for the inspo
Interesting. If I were the receiver, I wouldn't want to receive all that on lightning. The safety and security of on chain is my preference starting around the 1M sat mark. LN is still technically beta isn't it?
The threat is one of a hot wallet. This is the difference between a weekend poker table and a highroller table. While both tables are as safe as you make them, there's always a criminal threat when money is in the open.
Sure but I think LN is still building the table while hands are being played.
Just this week it was circulated to urgently upgrade LND software due to actively exploited vulnerabilities.
Yeah, turns out that was a local machine exploit not a flaw in LND. Either way, the point was risk tolerance is different at different income levels. Entrepreneurs boldly go into the darkness knowing most don't find safety. But for those who do, they forward the line of human progress.
Correct, it was attributed to a user’s machine being compromised. A similar security weakness as any hot wallet, but not specific to LN in this case.
Sure, it’s definitely not 100% without risk. It’s still the ‘bleeding edge’ in many ways but the tech has improved so much only in the last few years since I have run my node.
As for security I have never heard of a case of users losing funds that didn’t go back to user error in some way, same as with on chain. It’s as secure as you make it.
And for some use cases instant settlement is preferred or even required over onchain which would take ≈10min or more depending on current mempool environment.
10 minutes is still pretty instant for settlement in the business world though to be fair.
Well done sir!
but its a lot of capital locked!
i wonder if you can live off a one wohle bitcoin in cap only?
maybe in the future
$31 fee is on par with a wire transfer at a bank. Would be interesting how many hops it took and the total fee.
Yeah, I am seeing more and more frequent payments on LN that would have been cheaper to make on-chain– As a general rule, smaller payments are cheaper on LN whereas larger ones are cheaper on-chain since fees on LN are based on ppm (dependent on size) and fees on-chain are only dependent on # of UTXOs involved. So currently with low mempool fees, on-chain can be just as cost-effective if not more than LN.
However it seems that there are plenty of use cases where (near) instant final settlement is important, even if it's not the cheapest option. Same would be true comparing to a traditional Wire Transfer, I'd argue LN is still a vast improvement even if fees are relatively similar.
What do you use to get notifications for payments? I’m using woofLND but kinda like the look of yours more
This is Telegram notifications from BOS https://github.com/alexbosworth/balanceofsatoshis
Thanks
nice one, i only got a smaller node
but i am also doing some routing
but still it scales well in the future
i am ready and my node is too
This is the way! 🔥
OKX is definitely a hog, it’s probably a one way routing with them 😂
Yep, mostly one way! But I am (usually) able to rebalance it again within a few days. 🤞
Luv it Fil… I think many of us miss the fact that the value of each sat has increased in accordance with the value of an individual bitcoin. This is the paradigm shift
I would actually say Lightning is economically unsuitable for micropayments. I'm not sure where the general misconception stems from but it's plainly false when you have some experience running a node at scale
I'm not sure what the technical definition of a "micropayment" is, but for the sake of argument let's say it's a payment below the dust threshold and thus not possible on-chain.
So in the event of a force closure, these are not recoverable
They wear out my SSDs just the same as any other payment. Replacing SSDs is one of the main, if not the largest OPEX of running a Lightning node, especially when you factor in redundancy, downtime etc
Although the absolute fee they pay are usually lower than a larger payment, in relative terms they are very expensive (1 sat base fee is almost 5% on 21 sat micropayment)
Anecdotally in the past I have been routing what I suspect to be podcasting 2.0 payments with 5 sat base fees, which paid 500% fees on 1 sat payments, every minute
In most cases it makes more sense economically to accumulate in a mint then cashing out
