Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 11. (Read 14122 times)

Personally, I continue to want to look at information regarding developments (ease of use) to be able to run lighting node software on my own computer(s)... I am thinking that my computers are more powerful..and then I can potentially use them for other things, too.... even though I am not completely opposed to the idea of having a dedicated device that I could just run.. but if I am not at one location, and I don't want to travel with such a device, then someone has to restart it from time to time or whatever maintenance that it needs (as compared with my having my couple of computers with me while I am traveling)... but hey.. I might not be completely opposed to carrying an extra device with me while traveling, and surely some of the software (even EmbassyOS) seems to allow installing on a personal computer.. but it is not clear to me how easy it would be to set up on a mac..

Yes, I am whimpy in terms of my ongoing desire for attempts at both some kind of variation of plug and play and also a GUI interface, so far, I have been mostly using MacOs.. and IOS devices..

Maybe I am not doing a whole hell of a lot about some information that might be available.. but I am looking for easy-peasy..., while I still would not mind being able to review the kind of information that I feel that I might be able to somewhat easily run on my computer...so I can review before committing to it... and maybe somehow synchronize some kind of lightning node software that I would run on my Mac with the BitcoinCore 24.0.1 software that I am currently running.. on two different Macs.

BitByte has taken a close look at the 5 most popular Bitcoin nodes on which an own ln-node can be operated and has summarized the results under the following link
the following five products: RaspiBlitz, Start9, Nodl, myNode as well as the two DIY products umbrel/runcitadel were reviewed based on various factors

https://www.bitbyte.news/node-runner-top-5-lightning-network-node-machines/

On BitcoinVisuals there is no significant reduction of capacity over the last days. Since February, values are pretty stable about ~5400-5500 BTC. Idem at 1ml where currently a capacity of 5425 BTC is displayed. Very similar numbers are appearing on Lookintobitcoin, and Amboss.space even displays 5500+ BTC.

It's possible it's something similar than what I noticed last December regarding to the number of channels - simply a flaw in the "tracking software", not in the network itself.

PS: Thomas Jestopher from Amboss has answered the tweet. The error almost for sure is on Glassnode's side.

Lightning network capacity is going down.



This is the biggest drop ever.

I personally have no clues about the reason of this.
Anedoctically, this could be related to a new version 16.0 by LND, that had some problems and sent a few nodes down. Not sure about the reliability of this correlation though.

There is already a forum thread on the topic of Microstrategies bitcoin accumulation, including a yesterday post from Ratimov in which he specifically attempted to address the point that Microstrategies buys have been all over the place in the last nearly three years and also linking to a thread in which Ratimov outlines his own theory that it is not good to invest into bitcoin merely based on the behaviors of institutional investors..... and sure, I don't completely agree with Ratimov, even though I appreciate that he makes a lot of good points and outlines the data pretty well.. and hey, you do what you like in terms of timing your own investment into bitcoin strategies.   

I tend to think that it takes a whole fucking lot of time to build an investment portfolio, and there are needs to be careful in regards to trying to take short cuts, but surely making assessments of your own finances is good and then figuring out ways to combine regular DCA and buying on dips is also good... and surely once you have accumulated for 4-10 years or more, there are going to likely be points along the way that you are going to be able to reassess your options.. and likely you would have more options as long as you have been erroring in on the side of ongoing accumulation of BTC and perhaps even somewhat aggressively so long as you had not gone overboard and getting reckt along the way by being too greedy and trying to get rich too quick..

Pretty cool gstats, quite interesting.
I wonder if this could be considered a nice indicator as to when the market is above-average low - making for a good entry point. Ofc I wouldn't rely on it but when in doubt it's a nice extra to look at I guess.
A graphic to overlap their purchases with the corresponding market situation could be interesting to see if in retro they found good entry points. Just looking at their recent history of purchase it does look okay-ish to me.

You are in this forum long enough and in Bitcoin community long enough to know Micro Strategy is a biggest institutional investor so far. Details about their investment into Bitcoin. They got big capital investment from many big names and they use those raised capital to buy bitcoin.

Micro Strategy statistics

More institutional investors: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/treasuries/

This is very good information. I wish I am there to attend the conference. The registration is ongoing, and anyone who want to attend and you close to the venue is to do the registration now.

The major issues to discuss in the conference which I noticed from the OP information (the link) are the Adoption of Bitcoin and the Lighting Netwok corporation.
From the article I also came to notice that Microstrategy were the pioneer company to hold bitcoin as a company. I believe Elizabeth Stark the CEO and Founder of Lightning Labs will do justice in the conference.

Interrupting this interesting conversation to highlight the Lighting conference hosted by Microstrategy:

Bitcoin & Lightning for Corporations
As part of MicroStrategy World 2023

May 1-4, 2023 | Orlando, Florida


https://www.microstrategy.com/en/world-2023/bitcoin-for-corporations

I think those are great questions.  And I know, for example, that the Raspbiblitz devs are talking about releasing an i386/x64 version of the distro.  That would be cool to be able to take your little Pi and upgrade it to something a little more stout.

I really think they whole reason people want to use Pis is to:

1.  Demonstrate that Bitcoin can be run on low end hardware.
2.  Run a node that uses low resources including power.
3.  And that has a small physical footprint.

I think a time may come when these things will seem silly.  But at the same time I love rPis, and have several of them doing various jobs in my home.

At the same time... the limitations on the home node really revolve more around TOR bottlenecks than anything else.

You bring up a good point about the PI setups being apt to be under-powered.  THIS issue stems from people dangling too many things off the USB ports, or running the setup with a weak PSU.  And the setup might LOOK like it is working until the HDD starts choking and failing because of not enough power. Or the board shuts down for the same reason.  And this issue can easily be avoided... run the unit off a high quality USB C power source, or use self powered drives.  I have not had this problem for years with any of my Pis.

Call me a pussy if you must, but what is wrong with striving to have some plug and play reliability, even if it might be a side unit that is just always running (or mostly running and like you said maybe ONLY just running only one node that is used from time to time to verify personal transactions rather than trying to provide any kinds of services to others or to learn about various aspects of the whole lightning network?).. and in that regard, what's wrong with running an old laptop, or even spending a bit on some system such as Embassy in order to attempt to achieve more user-friendliness and power..   I don't claim to know much, but I heard that the various raspiblitz and some of those cheap set ups are likely way under powered and causing some of their issues based on being underpowered... and sure maybe if you pick some systems that are somewhat already intended as user-friendly and paying more, then you might be giving up a bit in regards to how much to be able to customize them, too.. but who needs to have problems with equipment failures that end up taking a lot of time and frustration?  

Don't get me wrong, I am a bit of a tinkerer myself, so I do actually enjoy some of those moments in which I am able to successfully set something up or figure something out, even if it may have taken me a few days and an expert would have gotten it done in less than an hour..  and so I can understand and appreciate some of the value in terms of both troubleshooting and then actually accomplishing the tasks, too.. ..

I don't claim to know shit in regards to the actual topic of interfacing with technical aspects of the nodes, and some of your various descriptions of trade-offs, and I ONLY recently started running bitcoin core 24.01 on a couple of macs.. but I hardly know what the fuck is actually happening beyond having 600 gigabytes or something like that, less space available on the harddrives.. .hahahahaha, even though at the same time, I am thinking that I am moving in the right direction to maybe later be able to verify my transactions through such nodes and thereafter considering that running some kind of a regular node then facilitates the ability for me to possibly expand into having a lightning node on each of the computers too.. ..and yeah, many of us Mac users don't really know much about terminal windows.. and we may well even get scared if we see a terminal window and have to type some kind of a command.. so many of us may well rely somewhat on plug and play expectations and/or other ways in which the hopefully user-friendly GUI software is screened and reviewed by others, and since you already know some of the various ways to play around with the software (through terminal interface), then you have some of the luxuries of both worlds, no?

Isn't this supposed to be a user-friendly thread?  #askingforafriend

Disappointing for CLN. I don't like LND's (Lightning Labs) affiliation with WEF and their "reluctance" to adopt BOLT12.

You know...  my CL node ran for about 1/3rd the time the LND node ran.  The fact the database is nearly an order of magnitude larger is interesting.

I can only assume most of that data is failed routing? lol.  I really am curious.  The LND node also had 5x the # of channels.

Causes a chin-scratchening.

cheaper but slower. This prevents acceptance as a means of payment. Speculative tool, yes. An investment vehicle, yes. Payment instrument, no

That's a lovely article. Wish LN got more of the attention it deserves.
Something I haven't given much thought yet, but this must be truely scary for the big players, MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and all similar payment-apps mainly used in asian countries.
-> Why would any merchant want to continue using them, draining fees over fees each day, when there is a decentralized solution with a TRUELY negligible fee. The only thing holding anyone back is adoption and legislation.

Oh.  It might happen sooner than I had thought!  I cannot stand trying to get Breeze running half as well as Zeus + either of my RPi nodes.

I am just stuck with a set of decision.

1.  CL or LND? This is hard.  I DO NOT want to run two.  I was running both when the HDD failed last time.  And there is no need to run more than one node as a hobbyist.  Too much to manage.  And running one will allow me to drop a reasonable amount of sats in the node and maybe enjoy seeing routing more often again.  And if routing is what I want to prioritize it seems LND would be the choice.  It routes better in my experience.  

2.  Stick with the RPi setup or graduate to something more stout?  There are a lot of good arguments for the latter.  Raid being the simple easiest one to see.  Particularly with LND since it's channel backup stuff is not (or at least WAS not) quite as well done as CL's.  The hard drive failure we simple to recover from in CL, but tricky with LND.  But the Pi takes just a few watts more than a nightlight (possibly even less really) and that is attractive.  And it is plenty of CPU.  And I COULD always just hook a little raid enclosure up to it for that purpose... hmm.

3.  Stick with Raspiblitz, or?  First of all I will not "roll my own".  I CAN for sure. I am highly Linux fluent, and would have no problem compiling and deploying the software.  I have done this in the past.  But maintainence is a bear.  And the LND/CL distros (Raspiblitz, Raspibolt, Umbrel, MyNode, others) I really like the ethos and style of Raspiblitz.  I am more a ssh/bash type of person that a Web Interface type.  But Umbrel does offer a lot of cool plugins... hrm.

And finally I have to come up with some other silly name.  Deej was a beast, but is gone.  Jeed never really flourished.  What is next?

Please do.

Your almost-horror story was quite fun to read, but I can only imagine how the drama unfolded.

In the end, you did the right thing.
And you learnt something new.
I hope we won't lose your enthusiasm for firing other nodes!

Well...  I will post it here since a few of you may have just noticed you have a few more sats in your onchain wallets again.  

Jeed, has joined his mirror image Deej in the abyss.

It was caused by nothing your resident troll could wag his finger at.  No flaws in either LND or CL.  Just the foibles of a man, who try as he might, is apt to do silly things.  Well Deej failed because of a fritzed HDD.  While Jeed was slain by his master accidentally posting his private keys on an image sharing site.  

Yes.  You read that right.  And it's a long story in which the hero thought he had CROPPED the funny image he was going to post somewhere but instead uploaded both of his monitors.  The OTHER monitor had a notepad open with the list of LND and CL seeds (and passwords in at least one case!) he has used.

The image was deleted from the sharing site within moments of having been posted.  But we know all about how "deleting" works nowadays.  Perhaps some admin will see the image and think he's struck it rich.  Luckily for me I know my way around both LND and CL fairly well now.  In fact let me take a moment to praise the power of the lightning-cli command (CL).  What a powerful set of tools there! I was able to use to get a running list of my "close_to_addr": "bc1qnevergonnagiveyouupnevergonnaletyoudown", for each channel.  and swept the funds off right away.  In fact closing down the node was very easy.

I am proud to say in spite of my ridiculous error last night I do know hopw to work both node implimentations quite well, and have well formed opinions of each.

Bottom line?

LND is more widely used, and for what ever reasons routes better than CL for the most part.
CL is just better software all the way around. The command line management is fantastic once you learn it.

But they are both great implementations, I think.  Today I am fighting off the urge to spin up an Eclair node, which I have not done so far... but yeah.  I think the roller coaster of me running lightning nodes might need to stop for a moment.  However running the little BTC node on the Raspberry Pi will likely continue for some time.  I don't need the hard drive yet.

Oh well.  It's been fun.  And I will likely still hang around here.  Who knows?  Maybe I will spin up another node eventually.

Indeed the teams are really working to ensure their is improvement in Bitcoin-lighting network and the number of registered has increased because so many people has benefited from the cheap rate.

We are already winning:
Bitcoin Lightning Network is 1,000x cheaper than Visa and MasterCard: Data

LN is proving an excellent layer for transactional bitcoin:


Just think about what happened in El Salvador. The only presence of LN as an alternative way of sending money, made wire transfer companies, eating up to 30% in fees to slashes the fees for remittances.