If all zaps in the world are happening with only a 5000BTC lightning capacity, imagine how much purchasing power can be fit into 21M BTC
Discussion
All zaps in the world are currently few hundreds/ thousand USD by day though :)
Fair but I think if the whole world was zapping it still would work since it’s only a few cents per zap and the capacity is $200M
How does lightning capacity work?
A lightning transaction is limited by the size of the channel. The total network size is 5400, so you wouldn’t be able to send more Bitcoin than that over lightning but technically the max amount sent is much lower depending on how large you channels are to the network.
Internet So more channels = more capacity? What’s the process for setting up a channel?
Not necessarily, you can have 1 very large channel that adds more capacity than 100 small channels.
Do you run a full node/lightning node?
Is it expensive/profitable/time consuming to create a channel?
I don’t run a node or LN node, but that’s because I’ve moved every year for a long time. When I finally plant some more firm roots I plan to set both up and maybe a personal mining rig as well.
You can run a node for free if you have an old laptop with around 512GB-1Tb of storage. Otherwise the hardware really only costs a few hundred bucks. It’s not profitable but there are many big advantages to running your own node
It costs probably on a few cents of electricity a month to keep running for me 24/7 so it’s not a huge operational cost
