OK good point I run 3 lightning nodes, I’ll start.
I’ll start by giving my configuration and then explaining my journey as best as I can remember it.
You can AMA during this thread. nostr:note16mjl0syjrknxlgghvh23su6uy8qcj2fu3z2f03g5vq8h0r7p5trsr00e3t
What are your pubkeys?
The only pubkeys I am willing to divulge are my NOSTR and nostr:npub1key55ax33gkl50uqemvl4khrtqrhzm7wzpc7fhseutt5ddkcwcrqgxlt3h 😂
Fair
I might re-think this going forward, but for now I am not publicly divulging this.
I'm always looking for good channel partners
I'm not actively routing public payments as I learned all I needed to by doing this for some while and I know you can't currently make it worthwhile in terms of fees / time spent managing.
Alex Bosworth, one of the leading Lightning guys is honest about this over on X, I remember around a year or two ago he disclosed that he earns around $30K for running a 10 BTC node (I believe).
He earns 30k ??!
So I run 3 nodes:
An upgraded Umbrel Home with the Bitcoin Core and Lightning Node, this is a full node and has several channels and if I keep it balanced, which I don’t bother to do now, could earn routing fees. I also run a full Liquid blockchain for any L-BTC or L-USDT that I have.
An upgraded RPi 5 8GB RAM with 2TB SSD, this was a full node, but Lightning crashed several times and I lost 0.2 BTC in channels due to not backing up sufficiently. I don’t trust this to hold liquidity, but I do run it for other tasks, such as running the Monero blockchain and experimenting with password managers, BitTorrent clients, server monitoring and password managers.
Start9 node running on a Lenovo NUC with 32GB RAM & a 2TB SSD. This is currently powered down because of this:
nostr:note1qqapptq9e48h7qlg0k6g5u880kt5gde3w9pc6z655dc263xt49ts5acaja
When I first setup my 2 Umbrel nodes, originally RPIs with 4GB + 2 TB SSD & 8GB + 1TB SSD respectively, I used the Lightning node itself to open channels using https://amboss.space/ and https://lightningnetwork.plus/ to find suitable nodes.
This was easy and cheap at the time. I remember setting up several triangle nodes to small capacity nodes on my first Umbrel and several large capacity channels to large public nodes on my second Umbrel. I also setup large channels between my own two nodes so I could route payments across my own network. I was experimenting heavily.
To rebalance, I installed RTL, Ride the Lightning and Thunderhub, but quickly realised that RTL was the tool for me. I also installed an auto rebalancing tool called LNDg, which I spent many months watching YouTube videos and reading articles in a failed attempt to master.
You can program your routing and balancing yourself with lnd-rest - it's easy python 😁
Good old triangle swaps. Good times.
Lndg is great. Set it to rebalance at 70% of Channel fee and let it fly.
It has a nasty anti pattern though:
Your channel liquidity gets drained instantly at a low fee. So you rush in and raise the fee.. And lndg quickly rebalances at that higher fee 😂
Have you upgraded to umbrel 1.x?
