Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 12. (Read 33426 times)

I *think* a lot of the clear-net stuff that is cloud hosted is from businesses running their nodes.
Their website and back end commerce is already at Amazon cloud or Google Cloud or wherever so that stays there too.

Look at voltage.cloud that we were discussing:

Do you actually think that the nodes they host are going to be anyplace other then the google cloud....

As for most users, running one of the nodes in a box that I love or any pre-packaged LN node it's usually just a click to do TOR, or in the case of Umbrel something you can't unclick. So things like that probably make up a large portion of the TOR nodes. Where people want to do it, but don't want to do it by hand so to speak. Which is fine, I want to drive my car I don't want to know how to refine gas.

-Dave

Mempool website added beta support for Lightning Network and you can find there lot's of useful information and pie charts.
First thing you see is that most LN clear nodes are running on Cloud servers (Google cloud, Amazon cloud, Data Web Global Group, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc).
However, around %80 of LN nodes are not shown here because they run on TOR, but 70% of liquidity and capacity is still coming from four biggest cloud servers with clear nodes.
Clearnet capacity is 4,187 BTC; Tor capacity is 367.76 BTC; and rest of capacity is from unknown.
This is clear centralization and I really don't understand what's the problem of running your node on raspberry pi or old laptop/computer... probably it's more convenient and cheaper to use someone else computer  

What do you think about this?


https://mempool.space/lightning


https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-per-isp

PS
I heard that Hetzner recently released some announcement saying that using their cloud for any cryptocurrency related services is against their terms, and they will have to ban that soon.
Same thing could happen with all other cloud providers at some point.

What about using the built-in channel state backup functionality since v0.10.2 instead of the backup plugin?
It is easier to set up and only downside is no PostgreSQL backend support.

c-lightning v0.12.0 was released a couple of days ago. Static channel backup is now available! Keep in mind that it should be your last resort. If your peers refuse to cooperate or go offline permanently, you might not be able to recover your coins. Using the backup plugin should be your main strategy as it is more reliable and lets you keep your channels operational after successful recovery.

Whoops... I feel like such a dumbie..

I hit the report Abul basar 365 for plagiarism button, since we know that it is just wrong to copy and paste and to present the content of others (in this case, TheJuice) as if it were your own.. but also he should not be able to benefit from his having had received merits for that post in terms of going back to bounty hunting or for whatever other reasons he might have had for faking his situation.

Thanks for pointing that out Rath_...

Unfortunately, that post is a copy/paste. Here's the original post made by a different member who also answered our questions.

Nice first post in this thread Abul basar 365.  Hopefully some members who are more experienced with lighting network can have some back and forth with you in this thread to verify that your proclaimed activities are legitimate..   Just based on your having had provided links and made a decent write up, I was going to send more smerits, but then I saw that your first several posts on the forum relate to bounty hunting and I am disinclined to send smerits to members who are heavily involved in bounty hunting activities unless they also provide good substantively helpful posts in other parts of the forum.. so hopefully you will continue to contribute in order that some of the members here can have some interactions back and forth with you and I would like to see you verified that your bitcoin related activities are legit and the information that you are providing is helpful to other members.  

I would appreciate if any forum member experienced with lightning network matters could vet the information provided by Abul basar 365.

By the way, in regards to the BOS ranking score, I am not clear about how to read that.  It appears to me that the first 12 nodes are tied for 1st, or am I reading that wrong?  I do understand that the scoring and the rankings will regularly change, yet I cannot see where you got 8th out of 12?  Another thing, I suppose you could say would be that you are 12th, or you could say that you are merely amongst a group of 12 other nodes that are tied for 1st (with the same "highest" score)?... Something is confusing to me about how to characterize/describe the BOS ranking location and how you mentioned 8th from that?

Today capacity
4570 BTC

https://1ml.com/

Today’s LightningNetwork⚡️capacity in Bitcoin (August 10, 2022)

You can give a json array with the whole path to the two *send* commands; at least, I checked for sendpay.
But can you give an array with a few peers (or one) you absolutely want to use, and let it build a path from there? I don't think that's possible.

There are routing hints, but that's something else entirely; it's part of the invoice and helps the sender find a route. It could be abused for your use-case though, if you were to create an invoice from another node that includes all (or some) of the nodes on your loop as routing hints.

I think there is a way, with Core Lightning, to build (maybe) a json array with the peers you want to use but seems that you also have to include other info about the peer in that json array so that it work. But I'm not even sure what would be the command to use to accomplish this. Maybe keysend or sendpay. Didn't look to the docs, tbh!

Okay well, yes, for testing what routes it would 'naturally' take, getroute is exactly what you want to use.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can force a 'next hop' - but maybe Rath_ knows more about this.

In this case I didn't want to send any payment, only to test the routing algorithm to see if it would "naturally" select the loop we have!
About the ocumentatiom, yeah, you're right! I read it, but somehow I overlooked that part where it says the default was "this node"!

Your question is answered quickly by the documentation..




In theory, using the normal sendpay command, you can pass a route argument instead of having it find a route automatically using getroute.
https://lightning.readthedocs.io/lightning-sendpay.7.html?highlight=sendpay

You would probably need to generate a route using getroute and then modify it manually, before passing it to sendpay.

That was a question I was asking myself. I don't know if the command itself already considers my node as the source node or not. I mean, I assume it does, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to try to get a route, running the command in my node but asking to get a route starting from some other node. Maybe I'm missing some scenario, but yeah, I assumed the command considers my node as the starting point! That's why I used fromid to try to force the route through the node I have a channel to, in this loop! Otherwise, any other node could be selected and the chance of using the loop I'm in, would be probably greatly reduced!

Usually such circles are used for rebalancing your own node, so you send a payment from your node D to yourself, again D, AFAIR.

But anyway just to find a route to a certain destination within the circle it doesn't matter, what I don't understand is why you use fromid=node_E and not node_D, as you want your own node as origin of the payment.

I replied to this news in the Lightning Network observer. I'm not thrilled, either..

---

I'm sorry; I don't have a loop right now to try with. Indeed it sounds pretty disappointing. Have you tried 'forcing' it over less hops? It's possible that your directly connected node E is fine, but that the next hop has trash liquidity. Or the one after that. Maybe try routing through just E or just D -> E -> A. Add hops until it no longer works.

US dollars or Stablesats are apparently coming to Lightning Network via Galoy Inc that created LN wallet used in El Salvador Bitcoin Beach project.
This means that we could hold, send and receive USD (backed by Bitcoin) along with Bitcoin in out wallets and use it for everyday payments.
There is no USD token like in the case of Tether, USDC and other stable coins, it's just bitcoin stabilized into dollar balance using inverse perpetual swaps.

First problem I see here is that centralized exchange OKX will be used for derivatives contracts used to hedge Bitcoin.
This means that funds could be frozen, and you are not really in custody of your coins in the moment when trade happens.
Second biggest risk is auto-deleveraging that could result in liquidations in volatile market conditions.

Short video explanation how Stablesats works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGO4dbwMYwg

I am not really thrilled with this news, and I think Bitcoin will outlive US dollar and other fiat currencies that are going down the hill with inflation.
Maybe this could be used as a tool in some cases, and fees are lowest compared to all other alternatives, but I would be very careful using it with LN.



Sources with more information:
https://galoy.io/announcing-stablesats-bringing-usd-to-the-lightning-network/
https://stablesats.com/

So, while @BlackHatCoiner doesn't come back, I'll take the discussion somewhere else.

Today I wanted to test a loop I have with 4 other nodes, a so called pentagon. 4 + me.

So, with my LN node, I used getroute to see if I could get a route only using the peers of this pentagon, by sending a payment and providing the starting node as an extra parameter and kinda force the route to use the most possible peers in this pentagon, ideally all of them (I think there are at least 2 peers with other channels to other peers of this pentagon which could possibly shorten the number of hops used).

Let's call nodes A, B, C, D and E, where D is my node. So, my goal would be to get a route from D -> E -> A -> B -> C. This loop was opened with 1million sats.
So, I used the following command to try to get the route:


The result was:

I tried to lower the amount in 100k sats steps down to 100k sats, and also tried 500 sats, 100 sats, 1 sat, and they all returned empty route arrays.
I also tried to raise the max hops number up to 5000 just for the sake of confirmation (default is 20 hops according to docs) but still no route!
If I don't specify the fromid parameter, I can find routes but none are my loop peers!
I'm not sure I can conclude that node E is a bad routing node because it is quite a big node and with many channels!

You guys have any thoughts on this or want to make a similar experience and share results?
Like, I have a loop and its route is not found/selected to route any payments! This is kinda disappointing!

Let's take a step back: are you sure that the restore of hsm_secret worked out?

You could compare hashes of the hsm_secret you had backed up and the one that is running on your node right now just to make sure.
The Core Lightning backup guide explains a few steps that you could potentially have missed and that might have caused the file not to be picked up (e.g. due to wrong permissions).
https://lightning.readthedocs.io/BACKUP.html#backing-up-your-c-lightning-node


Something like this and compare the two.