Is running a Lightning node for private use (aka not being a routing node) still a pain in the ass?
Does it still require constant fooling around and channel management?
Does it still require that you have to have millions of sats worth of channels just so you can send small Lightning payments without routing errors?
Not looking for big answers, just the general feeling.
I set up Alby Hub on my own mini-pc server (with BTC node etc). It took some doing but runs smoothly since. I used Megalith which is one of the LN providers built in, it think for somewhere around 50k sats to open.
Comforting to know it's smooth after initial setup. I don't mind putting in time, I just don't want to be constantly tinkering!
Megalith went down a couple of times but they were very responsive and got the channel online pretty quickly. The only other things were power and internet outages, but that’s rare. I have battery backup to keep things running if power is out briefly.
Not at all. Umbrel makes it dead easy. Just a couple of channels with well connected nodes is enough (though, more channels will get you lower fees per spend)
That said, Phoenix Wallet is even easier (runs on our phone) and provides essentially the same service (non-custodial lightning payments), with a more predictable fee.
And then there's Zeus doing similar but I have less familiarity with that and have found the UX less intuitive than I'd hoped
Yeah I think I struggled with the well connected nodes thing the last time, I guess I was always connected to much smaller nodes that weren't well connected, and the well connected nodes didnt want my mesily 500k sats channel.
I really want to try again though, definitely thinking Umbrel or Start9.
Phoenix had been my go to for a while. If I'm understanding it's essentially like you're paying to host a node on a server somewhere, right? And ypu pay some extra fees for the UX that is Phoenix?
Yeah, that’s exactly right. You should pick a big public node to connect with like Strike or eclair or the Bitcoin company. They can get anywhere on the network in a few hops.
With phoenix it’s not a node per se, you’re just maintaining one channel/UTXO with Eclair. When you send or receive on chain, it splices in and out of that channel, increasing or decreasing its capacity. When you send via lightning, it updates the channel state with the balance but doesn’t broadcast to chain.
It’s really slick and brilliant and really the only downside I see is that you are captive to the fees they charge for transactions because you only have one route through them. But as long as the fees are consistent and reasonable and less than visa, it’s a win in my book.
I suspect this model is going to be really common for providers. In fact, I think Zeus’s idea is to enable the same thing with interchangeable providers, so the software and provider are separate
Lastly, fedimints are the most exciting because instead of one UTXO per user, you can have many users sharing UTXOs and have one user who facilitates swaps out to lightning, all abstracted away from the user who just sees a balance (one which is recoverable from the federation)
