Serious question..

Preface: I love lightning. Or… Should I say, I *want to* love lightning. I set up Umbrel about 2 1/2 years ago and it was really really tough learning but ended up getting pretty comfortable with it. Especially when I figured out I could couple it with Tailscale and use it remotely. Through hardware failures, moves, stuff like that, I ended up not using it much. And it seems now… Lightning is almost more broken than it was back then. It was a learning curve, but once you got it, you got it. And now it seems like there’s been so much development that it’s even harder to understand and operate. Like I had a simple set up using Umbrel either on my computer locally or on my phone via Tailscale or through a connected app like Zeus and it was good. It was simple. In my mind, nothing needed fixing. The only “difficult” part was manually managing channels and liquidity every now and then and that wasn’t even hard. Am I wrong that Lightning has become more complex than it’s needed to be? Am I dumb? Over-sighting something?

I also want to add that I’m not knocking any lightning devs or anything like that. Those are the ones that I really want to hear from because they understand what’s needed and what the purposes of advancements are for. They are great people and I love that they use their talents the way they do.

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Discussion

I dunno. Been running a cln node, using Zeus to connect to it. My impression is that if you open a handful of large channels to reliable nodes (there are several ways to get recommendations and scores) and conversely, buy a large incoming liquidity prodiving channels, you will be okay.

But that is just my impression. Running a routing node is another matter. It is a shitshow. Highly competitive environment.

Did you ever use LNDg? Simplifies the channel management

Still looking for those updates on nostatum…

I struggled for hours in 2018 to buy a t shirt and earrings over lightning. It wasn’t until 2022 that I got my channels closed and got my funds back on chain…I didn’t use the channel in between.

What I learned was this: my play money turned to real money and I never learned lightning. My seed phrase and on chain coin was safe, but my lightning funds were inaccessible until I learned more.

Lightning requires more of the user than bitcoin. I still have to learn how to backup and keep backups organized for lightning.