You have just discovered the problem with having a single point of failure.
If you only have one channel partner, all it takes is them going offline and you are dead in the water.
Open a couple more channels with separate channel partners and this won't be an issue for you in the future.
Totally…but with only ~50k sats on lightning, and having used half those to open channel 1…it’s not prudent for me to open a second channel at the moment.
Similar could be said of Nodes I suppose.
Might be optimal to have 2-3 nodes going in case something happens.
Ive sort of integrated a proxy for both of the above by separating my send and receive addresses across nodes/partners
Nah, no need to have multiple nodes. That's what custodians are for. Have your node as your primary payment method, but keep a small amount with a couple custodians in case your node is down, so you aren't completely out of commission until you can get your node back up.
Am I understanding that you set up your Alby Hub with a 50k sat channel? If so, you would have been better off sticking with custodial lightning until you have enough to establish a few sizeable lightning channels (1m+ sats each).
You also don't need to have 3m sats to set up three 1m sat channels. You just need to have 1m sats and some additional sats to cover a few on-chain fees. What you do is open the first channel for say 1.1 million sats, then send all of that back to yourself on-chain using boltz.exchange. Open the next channel for 1.05m sats with a different channel partner, then send that back to yourself on-chain too. Finally, open the last channel with another partner for 1m sats. You can then send most of that back to your cold-storage if you don't want to hold much of a balance in lightning, and you will end up with more than 3m sats of inbound liquidity while only costing you the amount of 5 or 6 on-chain and lightning fees and two Boltz swap fees. Do this when on-chain fees are low, obviously.
I have a 1M channel.
I was trying to communicate, albeit not clearly, that I saved up 50k sats and it cost like 19k to open that channel.
A few hundred for the reserve requirement.
So until I reach at least 100k sats or most likely several hundred thousand to a Mil…it doesn’t make sense for me to open a second channel.
I’ve got Primal Wallet as my secondary / custodial solution as well as a few others such as a Speed Wallet…
But since my lightning use is strictly zapping on Nostr at the moment, I just move most my sats to my Alby hub once I reach a certain threshold
As a side note based upon my volume, while it may seem premature or unnecessary for me to run a node, it was as much about me learning and taking micro steps that move me closer to what I want; which is to be on a Bitcoin Standard and sovereign
