that's both beautiful and confusing 🥲
Do you want to open a channel with me? 🤲
Discussion
>Do you want to open a channel with me?
LN is not Facebook. Peers should not open channels by "affinities" or friendship.
Choose wisely your LN peers.
The right question would be: can we have smart contract on LN that will benefit economically both of us?
When people want to open a channel with a peer, should think about many aspects:
- Is it a private channel towards a good LSP that can offer good routes and cheap payments and reliability?
- Is it a public channel towards a good and reliable peer that can offer multiple routing payments through this new channel that will cover the expenses of maintaining it?
People that just a LN node for "I want to help the network" in fact are doing more harm than good to the whole network.
True that is not good to be connected to nodes that won't provide you that reliability and liquidity you need.
Maybe your node is optimized to the fullest and you have nothing else to learn? If that's the case it makes no sense for you to open random channels, but that's not my situation.
> LN is not Facebook.
😂 not disagreeing but funny statement.
> "I want to help the network"
I didn't say I want to help the network.
> doing more harm than good to the whole network
I'm not sure I agree with your statement and I'm not worried about the fragility of a distributed permissionless network tbh
You can run a private node perfectly fine and be part of that distributed permissionless network.
Public nodes are run for incentives. if that incentive will not exist, the whole LN will be a failure.
Totally agree but incentives are different for everyone, not just routing fees and not always monetary even. For builders with small projects it's normal to run a lightning node that is, at least temporarily, not profitable and many times not well optimized
You can do that (building apps on LN) in many ways:
- run a private node connected to a good LSP / public node
- run a public node with 4-5 good channels only, with good peers, as a decoy for a private LN node dedicated to your project
Nobody says that first you have to be profitable as LN node in order to build your project. But you have to take in consideration why somebody else would open a channel with your public node.
For example, I see Rizful (disposable) nodes perfectly fine for a small project. With just 1 or max 2 channels, well positioned, it is more than enough to have some liquidity for building a project. You can run both public and private channels on it.