So, we’re running a lightning node. For those of you that thought you could just spin up a Raspberry Pi and load Raspiblitz on it and get started, it’s not like that.
Well, it is kinda easy, and Raspiblitz makes it as easy as possible.
But there’s more.
Basically, you need to fund your lightning node. If you wanna just play around, you can just add in like 10 euros or something. You’re risking that money because this is beta technology, it can break at any time.
But if you wanna make a routing node, you need a lot more that than amount. How much, you say?
Well, I spoke with some people on Sphinx chat app inside the tribe “Lightning Liquidity Lounge” and they told me I need close to 10-20 channels. And the average balance should be 500000 to 1000000 sats. Yikes! Okay. But the problem is that you need to fund those channels, to provide liquidity. The liquidity also needs to be balanced, like the girl in the picture. Simply put, if you open a channel for 10000 sats, you can send 10000 sats but you can’t receive any. The inbound liquidity needs to come from that same channel or somewhere else. Also, you can only route payments up to 10000 sats. If someone needs more, they’ll either go through another node or simply use Multipath payments.
Multi Path Payments allows a user to send payments that are larger than the capacity of their single largest channel by utilising the liquidity of more than 1 channel at the same time. This needs to be active at the node level.
And it might not be instantly obvious yet it makes sense: When you send 10 sats from that example channel, your balance drops to 9990 minus fees. So if you wanna keep a busy channel open you’ll need to rebalance them regularly. Why that doesn’t happen automatically I still don’t get, to be honest. Feels like a must-have.
You can read more on Lightning Channels here https://bitcoiner.guide/lightning/#channels
There’s also an article that explains the various rebalancing options on Lightning https://blog.muun.com/rebalancing-strategies-overview/
I’m using the Ride The Lightning app that works nicely with my Raspiblitz. One of the developers posted a tweet on how to rebalance your channels, with circular rebalancing.
Yeah, I still don’t get it. No, actually I do get it but whenever I try it it just fails to complete. RTL is very cool and easy to use but many people have complained about failed commands. Same here, I’ve tried to connect to nodes many times and keep getting various errors.
Oh well, I hope the developers fix the bugs because I like the interface.
You can connect to the kroisos lightning node here.
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