My recommendation is to NOT run a full public routing node, if all you need it for is sending and receiving personal payments as needed. Open 2 or 3 private channels from your home node to well-connected nodes. This will give you redundancy in case one of them happens to be offline, and will also give you greater chances of successful routing. It also ensures that your channel liquidity stays where you want it and doesn’t get shifted via routing other people’s payments. Less work and stress than a public routing node too.
Discussion
If you only willing to open up three channels you'd probably be better off with Phoenix when it comes to reliably sending/ receiving payments. And then you're only custodial risk is when you use their swap service.
Not a bad solution but the one issue you run into there is rush you’re entirely dependent on their LSP and you don’t have an option to connect to other nodes. A similar approach could be achieved with Breez, Blixt, or Zeus which all allow you to open channels to nodes other than their own LSP.
I really don't have enough experience with breeze to speak on it. Zeus is an amazing remote. And I would be happy to support their work through fees for their services. However I think we've all experienced their services to be a little buggy. Blixt is truly alien tech but it is nowhere near idiot proof. which is why I won't go on record recommending it. I have never failed to route to or from Phoenix And as long as they write down their seed their funds are safe.
Good point you bring up with Zeus because it can function as a remote for your home node, or as a “node in the phone” line Phoenix now with the new beta. Breez and Blixt are also “node in phone” wallets. Breez UI is more user friendly for the casual/new user and hides advanced settings in the menus, whereas Blixt moves those advanced settings into the UI. My main point was that while Phoenix is reliable but it only opens channels with the ACINQ node, Breez, Blixt, and Zeus (node in phone) all allow you to open channels to any nodes you want, although they do each have a default LSP if you just want to use that.
I'm not too concerned with ui complexity, worst case scenerio is I learn some stuff I eventually need to learn anyway. Functionality is much more important. Counting on lsp was the root cause of non-custodial payment failures for me yesterday & while they may be a step in the right direction or a good backup plan, they just aren't reliable enough to utilize for casual transactions yet. So, regardless of which wallet, opening some private channels sounds like the way to go. Is it possible to attempt payments through lsp & fall back private channels before expiry? Or I guess, does an invoice even allow for multiple route attempts?
Not sure. That will depend on the wallet probably. Lightning wallets try to calculate the best path/routes available and will try several before failing the payment. Some wallets let you define stuff like the maximum fees and hops, or the initial outgoing channel/hop.
Ok, cool, thanks. I noticed some of those fields in Zeus but given that I have been attempting to use it as a stand-alone, I didn't even bother with them.
This so hard tbh. If your goal ISNT to be a routing node private channels are the way. Just in this case you will most likely need bigger well connected nodes and most start out at 1 to 5mil sats per channel required, so may be expensive to be well connected with few peers. Best thing you can do is find peers with low fees, connected to peers you need or send to alot, and are down rarely.
That's good to know in advance. Do you think 1, 3 and 5mil would be a good spread?
(Tried zapping your reply but can't rn, I'll try it again later 😅)
You can do something like kraken for 1 mil alby for 2mil and think wos and is still a good peer to have at 5 to 10 mil. If you have specific content creators you support make sure to add them with a small channel to zap for low fees! Same goes for services you might use alot like bitrefill, breez, mutiny, etc.
Awesome, thank you!