Make a List of Nodes and Channel Sizes

Make a list of nodes you like. It won’t be obvious and it doesn’t need to be perfect. Consider connecting popular nodes that aren’t connected. Find a few low fee nodes, high fee, outbound sinks, or choose one specific niche.

Take a look at channel recommenders and other helpful tools offered by LNDg, LNnodeinsite, LnRouter and Gridflare.

Consider roughly how many sats you can allocate to Lightning. You aren’t going to get very far with less than 20 - 30M sats. Take that number and figure out how many channels you can support.

Don’t make channels smaller than 2M sats. I like girthy channels between 5M - 25M. Large outbound drains 50M - 100M. That means I made less channels, but I believe it has positioned me uniquely. There is no rule.

I base my channel size on the activity + channel sizes of the node I’m partnering with. If the node has all 5M channels then there’s no point in 20M. If a node routes a lot of large payments I want a bigger channel to support that. I’ve updated many channel sizes over time.

If I had to choose one channel size it would be 5M sats.