Is lightning still reckless? It has been 6 years.
Discussion
Id say so, ya. At least my experience running a node and all that has been reckless af. Lost some good sats out there...
I think I lost about a month of stacking to channel closures last month. I am significantly scaling back the liquidity I put up on lightning. Juice is not worth the squeeze. Reward is not worth the risk.
I think it's best to only open channels with other node operators with whom you have direct contact. Nostr/Telegram/Signal/Phone whatever, you need to be able to message them and say "hey man, what's up?"
Great advice, wish I started like that when I did.
Ya, agreed. I am opting for 3 channels opened on blixt wallet with vendors i frequent, and one channel to blixt wallets node. By doing so i can have an ln address via blixt's lightning box. Coupled with persistent mode, the blixt wallet serves as my poor mans 'on all the time node' ( more like on most the time ) . Thats gonna be my lightning experience for now.
I still don't feel comfortable keeping more than a million sats on an LND node.
Why not? Worst case scenario it goes back on chain to your address.
Ever been force closed?
Yes, only once. And it returns to your on chain wallet, worst case you pay some fees, which were reserved at channel creation.
It can get worse. If it is an older channel (or nin-anchor), the fee you reserved might have been at stupid small amounts. The channel close tx is basically buried under 700mb of horseshit, and is stuck until mempools clear or you sacrifice hundreds of thousands of sats to an accelerator.
I guess I'm lucky. 4 years of node running only one foced close. My brothers node... main liquidity ones no issues.
To a hot wallet.
I'm sure it's fine for large institutions with security protocols.
yes
Rare to find anyone that accepts Bitcoin. Let alone uses the lightning network. My spending sats just sit like cold storage anyway.
Traveling for work. I stopped at a store called the Bitcoin embassy tried to buy something with Bitcoin and they wanted me to use some 3rd party Bitcoin processor
My umbrel node was down for 4 days, restarted it today and found 4 channels remote forced closing.
It seems my node paid crazy fees of around 166,000 sats for those closings. 166k! $70. Fuck 😑.
Two weeks ago I lost another 3 to remote force closings, thankfully at better fees.
Rekt. Yes it is reckless, not for the faint-hearted. I'm gonna keep the channels I already have but I'm not opening new ones, force closings are killing me.
Routing payments feels good, sounds nice, but reality's math is killing me.
I'll leave it to professionals, for me it's totally unsustainable.
Since the opening node pays for force closures, you could pay node operators for opening channels to your node. This would allow you to calculate exactly the cost on your side.
Yes, true, but I'm done with paying 🫠.
This last event cured me from trying to run a routing node. I've done it for 2-3 years just to feel good about helping the network, i've paid for openings, force closes, rebalancing, loops, and it really doesn't add up for me. Was fun, learned some stuff, but It's way too painful losing so many sats for nothing.
I'm not using it for sales or anything, other than routing i only used it for my personal transactions.
I'm down to 22 channels now, 3 of my partners are usually offline so 19. I'm gonna keep the channels and the node up 24/7 like always for any forwards to go through.
But I'm done with the rest, i've reached my breaking point lol.
Fair enough
in my experience, the rewards from forwarding payment is not yet enough for the time and expenses required to run a node. Let alone the very expensive recent force closing. beside that, I believe that losing SATs due to software bugs is relatively rare
Consensus is that, after 6 years of two companies basically stewarding the protocol, lightning is still reckless. "Reckless" means "you should probably expect to lose money".
I think it's reckless to try and run a routing node on raspberry pi especially when you're unsure of exactly what you're doing.
Not so reckless to run a node, open some channels for personal use and either have them unannounced or set the max htlc to 0. That way you won't route and you can still spend and receive without a big risk of unwanted force closures while retaining full custody and control of your funds.
It's all about determining the reason --WHY-- you're running a lightning node and setting things up that work toward your reason.