It caught on fire.
As in, it worked.
Clickbaity title aside, this is a wonderful service from the Lightningnetwork+.
It all started when a Greek node operator contacted me on twitter to open up a channel. He asked some stuff, I explained that it’s best to do a ring of fire, that’s what the cool kids are doing these days, but I haven’t done one yet.
We made a second one later with a smaller channel capacity, but let’s talk about the big one.
So, I got the excuse to stop procrastinating and move my sats from my other wallets to my node wallet. Sent 1.200.000 sats, waited a for a bit, bitcoin showed up.
Then I went to https://lightningnetwork.plus/
I made an account, just an email and the lightning node id. It can be more anonymous with a throwaway email or a protonmail, I guess, if you want. Node details loaded within seconds, and when I refreshed, I was ready to hop into a ring of fire.
I wanted a 1 milllion sat ring. I clicked to enter the only one that had an available spot, but it somehow entered me into another one that had 5 million!
Oh, no…
I looked around, thankfully there was a button to get out. Oh, good. I didn’t want to mess up a 5 million sat ring. I guess the system found the 1 mil spot unavailable and placed me into the next available one? Or maybe I misclicked, I’m not sure. No big deal. The only problem was that I was getting email updates about the aborted ring.
Anyway, I looked again. No rings at 1 mil. Sigh.
Naturally I went on twitter to complain about it.
They were nice enough to reply, but yes, in the mean time I got impatient and decided to try starting a ring of my own.
Well, not a ring, the suggested shape was a triangle, so I chose that one.
I left the default settings alone, entered 1 million sats as a prerequisite, left minimum 12 months. And started it!
Boom.
There was a tweet button, and I’m impatient, so I shared my ring. That’s when BTC_LN replied and they also retweeted my ring request.
I’m saying this because the 2 spots filled up in a few minutes, and I can’t know if it was normal supply and demand on the service or because they retweeted it.
Anyway, when the 2 spots filled up, I got an email notification. I checked out the page https://lightningnetwork.plus/swaps/715
There was a handy block of instructions telling me to connect to a specific node. The lightning id was there, I copied it, fired up my Ride The Lightning, opened a new peer and a new channel for 1000000 sats and a fee of 1 sat/byte.
And that was it from my end!
I went back to https://lightningnetwork.plus/swaps/715 and clicked “Done” as in I declare I’ve opened the channel.
A few hours later, all the channels looked okay on my node. The lightningnetwork+ service asked for a simple feedback on the node that was supposed to be connecting to me in the triangle. I had an incoming channel, so I clicked the green thumbs up.
And that was it!
Easy and quick lightning liquidity. No messy telegram chats. That said, I still like plebnet.org but there are so many plebs in there that they type up about 700 messages per day, not kidding. It’s impossible to arrange something like a ring of fire, or I guess you can do it with DMs? I’m not sure, haven’t tried it yet.
This service is cold and impersonal, plebnet is more like a chaotic bar. Depends on what you like, both are very good ways to arrange lightning channel swaps.
Lightningnetwork+ also has a comment box, which I didn’t need for the 1 mil channel triangle, but we did need it for the smaller one since the new node operator had port connection issues. A few comments and replies later and we figured it all out, completed the ring. So yeah, Lightningnetwork+ also allows you to be social when you need it.
You can connect to my node here http://kroisos.io/node
One last thing to do before closing Ride the Lightning was to #dropthebase. Rene is a lightning developer who needs us to set #zerobasefees on our channels to help with routing payment algorithms. So, as soon as all the channels opened up, I just went into the Channel/Actions/Update fee policy, and set the base fee to zero in all outgoing and incoming channels. That was it.
All in all the service worked splendidly. I don’t know if their retweet was what filled up the spots, but I think they would have filled up eventually since there weren’t any other rings available. It’s wonderful to see the lightning network grow and get such good tools.
Did I mention how lightning is the new killer app?
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