...What puts my mind somewhat at ease is that on RaspiBlitz c-lightning comes with the backup plugin already set up and running, mirroring the channel states both on the SSD and the SD card....
That's great if you can get to them, and spin up a new node and sync it before the other people force close all the channels since you are offline.
I'm a tech geek, and a
BTC geek and I admit it. Had something catastrophic happened to my node with the bad fan I could have been back up and running with spare hardware in under a day.
If you don't have the spare HW to do this, it IS something you should be thinking about. And definitely something we should be discussing more here.
-Dave
That's partly why I'm setting up a lightning node on my desktop PC as well -- not just for testing, but so that I have a fully synced blockchain ready in case I'm in a pinch. My main worry is the channel state getting corrupted on both the SSD and the SD card at the same time. Which may seem a bit paranoid but I'm the kind of person that keeps at least 2 current backups at all times + periodical backups that are kept at physically separate locations. Accordingly the combination of SD card + Raspi makes me a bit uneasy.
To reduce the risk of outage-caused data loss I've actually been looking into UPS systems. However the consumer grade UPS systems seem rather unreliable (eg. occasional serious overheating problems; cases where the power on the UPS caused a power outage rather than preventing one) and the enterprise level UPS systems are too expensive for my purposes (might as well just build a proper server at that point). So for now I'm looking at what other contingencies I could put in place.
Along the way I found this guide on "How to recover funds from a unilateral channel closure" in case
everything goes wrong, hopefully none of us will need to refer to this in the future
https://github.com/mandelbit/bitcoin-tutorials/blob/master/CLightningRecoverFunds.mdThis recovery method hinges on the channel using
option_static_remotekey though and while the c-lightning docs mention this option being the default since 0.7.3 and LND refers to it in its source code I have no idea how wide spread it is in practice -- maybe someone else can shed some light on this, I'm still very early in my journey.
I'd rather not post my node id publicly from my Bitcointalk account for now as I'm not yet entirely sure what this would mean for my privacy.
If you are running behind Tor then you should be concerned only about the origin of coins which you used to open your channels. Currently, all funding transactions are public. If you decide to stick with c-lightning and grow your node, we can open a dual-funded channel.
Note that some Lightning explorers log almost everything including IP address and alias changes. If you were running your node on clearnet in the past, you should close all of your channels, mix your coins and set up another node with a new public key.
I'm aware of these points, but they are definitely worth repeating.
Thing is, while I don't feel the need for strict opsec, I also don't want to make linking my lightning node to my Bitcointalk account as easy as a quick google search
I might change my stance in the future or send you a PM once I got a firmer grip on running a node, but for now I don't want to post something that I can't un-post.
On a sidenote, thanks for starting this thread! It's been a treasure trove of practical knowledge that really helped me getting started.