I use raspibltz. Autopilot opened three channels with 6,770,000 sats before i even realized my deposit had confirmed. Now all my sats are tied up in channel closings for weeks. Pitfalls are many.
Discussion
How did that happen? Not aware of any automatic channel openings that could happen. I usually typed an address for a node and tried to open a channel but it would always say “failed to find peer” or something similar. Been a while since I tried.
Autopilot is on by default when raspiblitz boots. It picks from peers who are linked to your node. They were not preferred peers. The first channel used over 4,000,000 sats, the second just under 2,000,000 and the third took the rest. I was planning on using mempool.space and other resources to add high rated well connected peers. And open balanced channels with them. Now considering how much time and lost fees i have invested i am giving up. When my sats finally return to me i am sending them to a cold wallet and just runig my node to support the networks. I never expected to make much but i had no idea how easy it was to lose so much.
How much did you lose in fees in the end?
It won’t end for some time. 6,700,000 sats are timelocked and in limbo. I had a good channel opened and balanced with ACINQ. It took several thousand in fees to accomplish that. Closing all my channels to exit will cost over 200,000 sats. I made other small mistakes that cost unnecessary fees. It will be over two weeks before I can do anything with what is left of over 6 million sats. I hope you have better success. Proceed with caution.
Wow. This wouldn’t have happened with highly rated other nodes?
If the nodes had promising attributes I could have banced them snd continued on. Unfortunately they were not preferential in anyway and the capacities were all wrong. There was no choice but to close the chanels. I just hope my sats make it back from limbo. Regardless I have to admit I am out of my league. It will be a very expensive lesson for me. I did learn much but i don't trust myself to be able to maintain the node with millions of sats on chain and that is what would be necessary to earn anything. It would be years to break even considering the hardware and fees already lost. I have only myself to blame. I hope you have a better experience. Maybe Nakamoto will help you.
I see. Im not really looking to earn. I really just want to have my payments go through my node on lightning. So what is your solution now? Simply use trusted nodes to rout your payments?
I wish i lived in bitcoin economy. I sell sometimes and accept btc but seldom do i pay with bitcoin. I live a simple life, beyond gas and groceries i don't spend much. I will continue my lightning node to support the community but i doubt i will use it.
I see. Solutions will become easier I’m sure. I’m not paying with it much either, but I’d really like to. However I’m a little paranoid with it too.
Hello there! It's unfortunate to hear that you've experienced some difficulties using RaspiBlitz. Such experiences can be frustrating, I understand. Lightning Network is still a very early technology, so hicc-ups are to be expected.
As for the specific issue you have faced; closing channels on the Lightning network does take some time as transactions need confirmations between each stage of channel close-down process... it just has something like procedures and processes every channel opening/reopening or even the cancellations command too.
However with proper planning before connecting your RaspiBlitz autopilot node to other nodes and channels at early times when most users preferred normal/hardware from desktop setting things this kind of situation could possible mitigate.
Let me know if you got any questions or needs any information related with implementing/configuring your node. Happy to contribute further towards making Bitcoin/Lightning user operations as delightful as possible xD