I am tired of people running shity nodes on RPi. They are stubborn in not want to understand that their shity node crashing could affect the whole network.

When these people will learn that they can still run a PRIVATE node (with unannounced channels), that are enough to pay the beer/coffee over LN.

https://stacker.news/items/402904?commentId=402941

FFS throw that RPi node to the fucking garbage!

When people will understand that the weak point for RPi nodes is the DC card and the USB cable that is literally fucking the data drive?

BTC and LN require a huge traffic I/O for both SD card and the data drive (no matter you use SSD or HDD). The simple fact that the drive is NOT internal is fucking this I/O traffic. And your node always get fucked.

If you want to run a PUBLIC ROUTING node, then get a fucking SERIOUS machine, with INTERNAL drives and in RAID. Also have 100% good maintenance and a lot of liquidity.

FFS stop running public nodes with less than 1BTC liquidity!

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You had me right up to the last sentence. Your last sentence sounds a lot like “just stop being poor”.

amén

You'd be lucky to successfully run a personal node. Umbrel sucked and locked up my entire network and Start9 would always fault out trying to login. Unplugged the RPi, formatted and repurposed the SSD.

Next adventure might be a Futurebit hobby miner.

Yep, I’ve killed my two Pis. One positive was the “learn by mistake” factor. Going to repurpose a ThinkPad instead.

Lol my rpi ran fine for 3/4 years. Just shut it down on my own the other day for now

I agree with that. Use private channels if you don't mind to route , and keep well working your node. However I'm corious what are the main failures that disrupt the network . hardware failures? Disrupted network connection ? Unbalanced channels?

Disruption examples?

Here is one example:

- I am paying a LN invoice to X destination.

- I am running a private node

- My payment went from my LSP/other private peers to a public node 2nd hop then to the 3rd hop, a RPi shity node that went offline for various reasons.

- that HTLC get stuck for several days until my channel will get force closed.

And was not even my fault, was just a random shity RPi node in the network.

So ... I think that for this nodes network stability could it be the major issue? It would be interesting to understand if the network protocol used it is strong enough and if it recover after failures .. I have to say that using umbrel under onion with odroid m1 and nvme storage, with lnd it always worked well .. No routing node ..

lightning's source routing system is brittle like this, and it's difficult to even gather useful data about the network, as well as propagate it effectively to mitigate this kind of fault

there's no doubt that there needs to be further development of the protocol

If more noobs will understand that is NOT really necessary that everybody should be a "public routing node", the network will be much better as it is today.

Most of force closing channels happen EXACTLY because of these shity nodes. And if we can limit to minimum necessary the force closed channels, LN will work quite well.

Having a LN structure by levels and users choose their own level based on their own capacity, will make things to go smooth and well.

High level: big routing nodes, professional ones, well maintained, huge liquidity. Providing high availability and liquidity for big routes.

Medium level: LSPs, well connected to the high level, providing liquidity and routes for private nodes and users.

Low level: edge nodes, private nodes, mobile private nodes, regular users.

But nooo, every noob now want to run a routing node with a shity RPi over Tor, "to earn sats and help the network", when in fact are only clogging the network.

i don't think #lightningnetwork is the final destination for L2s

i haven't looked deeply into Ark but my first impression is kinda favourable

i think that the problem we face is how to do trustless relaying of messages across the network that don't involve falsified UTXOs and can fall back to alternative routes when a planned route fails

it's a cryptography problem, and i'm almost certain there is already a specialised hash function that exactly does what we need, just nobody has figured out that it can do this

you also rage against the AI, i hate that shit, and you know it operates by a specialised hash function right? the AI hash is called a "proximity hash" and it allows you to plot multiple paths through a graph that generate a valid structure that humans recognise (they are like human memories, in fact)

something very close to this will enable us to do trustless path routing and the days of stuck payments will be over, just like QUIC and other new reliable transports have ended (most of) the connection reset by peer problems

actually, just articulating that first point about failure resistance

already right now, if LN protocol had a notion of forking it could be literally like lightning and if it forks into a dead end it can step back one, two, three etc hops and try alternatives

the messages would be a lot bigger but they would have resistance

i started working on this idea with Indra last year, how to do forks, the https://github.com/indra-labs/indra repo has code for "forking" messages, that encode multiple routes for a packet so it can even duplicate across and iirc i even made a join message

Many people think you have to run a routing node to use LN when in reality it's fine to run an edge node that just does payments. I think that's where the RPi node would shine.

I don't know how many node tutorials I've watched that never mentioned this. Video creators (probably unintentionally) give the impression that everyone running a Lightning node is beneficial (like running a Bitcoin node) but based on your experience it seems that running one with the wrong hardware can do more harm than good?

I wrote several guides about these aspects of running nodes.

Also explaining the big difference between public and private nodes.

https://darthcoin.substack.com/

My concern is that if we follow your recommandation, then 99% of the Lightning nodes would be edge nodes connected to the top 10 largest routing nodes almost all run by corporation and mostly exchanges.

Maybe it will make the Lightning network (slightly) more reliable and faster but it will surely make it less decentralized, less private, less censorship resistant. In worst case we could end up with a walled garden greenlighted Lightning network were you have no choice than user the approved routing nodes and you must KYC your node to connect to them, and as most merchant will accept Bitcoin Lightning using solution from banks and card payement providers, you will have no choice than connecting to this KYC Lightning otherwise you cannot spend your BTC at most merchants.

Maybe I missunderstood something and this doomsday scenario could never happen but of there a slight chance that it could happen, I would say that we should continue to encourage the core values of Bitcoin and also promote decentralization for the Lightning Network and if it makes it less reliable or slower, then improvements must be made to make it works in such environnement without blocked HTLC, without unwished force closed and with faster confirmation, or improve node management automation to optimize each nodes in the network.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that not all must run routing node and that it requires some investemement (appropriate hardware and time to learn) but with all respect for everything you did and do for the community and all your quality education material you provide, claming that most enthousiats should refrain to run a node with some routing channels and should not run a node with less than 1BTC of liquidity, seams really counter-productive in the adoption we are looking for.

Running a private node (THAT DOESN'T ROUTE) is just fine.

Is time to have more quality than shity quantity.

Quality doesn't affect decentralization.

But shit nodes in large quantity will affect seriously the entire network and that will be more dangerous than just some big central public nodes doing quality routing.

Instead of fucking each others, we should start fucking the bansters by having a good network.

So you don't see any solution where anyone that want to participate can do it and still keep a good quality network?

Is it similar to Tor, you cannot prevent someone to run a relay or exit on a slow or unreliable connection, still it's better for privacy, decentralization and sensorship resistance to have some slower relays than limiting the ability to run a relay to only the most powerful machines, which could all end up being AWS and Azue hosted relay.

If we can make the software more resiliant with fall back and multi parallel routes to picknup only the best ones and avoid slower and offline nodes + add good automated management then we don't have to restrict anyone to run their node as routing when they want to contribute as much as they can.

Again, maybe I'm wrong and I'm missing something that make this impossible to achieve and true decentralization, censorship resistant and privacy is only an unachiveble dream but I'm not convince yet of it.

Yes, you are still missing the point: regular users could just run a PRIVATE NODE.

Is still a part of decentalization, is still non-custodial.

Or you do not know the difference between private and public node?

Hey man, can you explain how all these RPis are causing the network issues? Are a lot of pi's crashing and screwing up routes? I have been running 3 different pi nodes with ssd and they are working ok. You mentioned "DC card", do you mean the micro SD card? Anyway im always interested in learning and would love to increase the reliability of my node. Can you help provide a list of suitable hardware that someone could use to build a more reliable node?

Correct, you need good hardware and a good setup. Running on an SD card that is external is no good.

Blixt with 3 to 5 private channels, persistent mode, lightning box for ln address receiving is the end place for most people. And it works really well!