Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 29. (Read 32079 times)

Is anyone using either Zap or Eclair wallets?  I have a half dozen channels open on each to various large nodes, but haven't had *any* movement for many months now.

On my old PC & phone I could see the balances shifting on a daily basis, but with the new hardware, no movement at all.

*edit* the Zap wallet is open near all the time, while the Eclair App is open on an ad-hoc basis.

Hi guys, I am new here... Where is the post where the "Lightning network" was first proposed on this forum?

I'm not sure if the previous replies already made it clear enough, but how I like to put it:
Sure, other users can open channels towards you, but then you can only receive and not send anything. They are thus only able to send funds to you and not use you as an intermediary node to send funds to another of your peers.

Your topology would look like this, with 4 connections for example:


A can't send to C, unless C has e.g. donated you some funds or bought something from you, so that the channels look like:


In this case, you'll be indeed able to forward a payment from A to C of up to 0.5BTC, because your C-channel allows it.

In conclusion, I think it's now easy to see how it's best for routing if you have many, large, and balanced (similar balances on both sides) channels.

The ability to send out money (to forward payments) is called outbound liquidity. To get it, you need to lock up own funds in channels (because the one who opens a channel of course then has the balance on their side of the channel).

There's a way that allows you to be guaranteed to get as much inbound as outbound liquidity (otherwise if you're the only one opening channels, sure, you can send, but you can't receive anything), which is something like a triangle swap or pentagon swap (https://lightningnetwork.plus/), or you can buy inbound liquidity. But for outbound, you need to lock up own funds. You need both

The first question was rephrased to "What would happen if some nodes went temporarily offline?". As for the other one, I believe I wanted to include the answer to it in some other question. I will fix that later.


Nothing. Currently, I have two channels which charge zero fees and it's been a while since I routed any transaction through them. You are more likely to end up with an unbalanced channel if you don't set any fees.

the earnings from a lightning node are in general proportional to the amount you have locked into your lightning node. meaning: the more liquidity you provide in channels, the more you can possibly earn (there are other factors, but generally speaking). and because the fees are relatively low (on lightning), you need a lot of channels with a lot of liquidty to earn a "decent" amount of sats

the biggest cost (besides hardware/electricity or hosting costs) are the onchain fees to open and close channels and atm it is pretty hard to cover them with what you earn with routing fees. the exception is the mentioned "unless you have a lot of coins"

maybe others have other experiences, but these are mine atm running my node for some months now

You removed some questions such as “What happens if some nodes go temporarily offline?” or “What discourages from running big nodes and overtaking the network?”. Would you mind explaining us what made you do so?

I have a question about this:

Why should you have a lot of coins deposited in your LN node? Aren't the users supposed to deposit and be responsible for their channel's capacity? Also, what prevents someone from allowing free transactions (not even for 1 sat per tx)? Aren't lightning clients choosing the node with the lowest fee rate?

Thanks for the awesome work.
Keep it going. We need to bring LN to the masses.
I'm in conversations (emails) with a couple of mayors of some cities in my country to try to find suitable places to do some workshops to get more people to know Bitcoin and integrate LN in their businesses...
That's what I'm contributing with and will also learn from those workshops and from this thread too.

Cheers
Dkvtx

I don't think that anyone has noticed but a few days ago I updated the original post. I have added new questions and divided them into 5 sections and I also updated all of the answers. 2020 version is available here for comparison. I would appreciate any feedback.

Yes, indeed. The looking also counts.
In my case, I'm not even sure how much I spent but I only bought the RockPro64, the M.2 drive and the heat sink. The case, I made it on my own and it's not even finished. I used acrylic boards. And I was also learning how to program stm32 chips to build a fan controller, based on M.2 drive temps. Butit's not finished because I kinda slacked at it for a while. :p But I have intentions to finish this.

No issues, the fan is really quiet. You do have have to make sure that when assembling it the thermal pads that come with it are on the chips properly and that thay do touch the heatsinks on the case but that is about it.

As for the cost. I could have easily saved $30+ by not using an case that has a m.2 drive attachment included and going for a cheap generic one, and another $30+ by using a regular USB drive instead of a m.2 but I went for looks and style. And still came to under $200

So
This: https://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-HDTB410XK3AA-Canvio-Portable-External/dp/B079D359S6/
instead of this: https://www.newegg.com/silicon-power-ace-a55-1tb/p/N82E16820301414 (which has actually gone up a bit since I ordered it)

And
This: https://www.amazon.com/iUniker-Raspberry-Aluminium-Heatsink-Supply/dp/B07D3S4KBK/
instead of this: https://www.amazon.com/Argon-Raspberry-Support-B-Key-Compatible/dp/B08MJ3CSW7

Which would have brought the cost down to under $150 including tax.
Can also get a pre packaged RPi kit that has the Pi & Case & Power Supply & SD and saved another few dollars.

But none of it would not look as cool :-)

With the Argon case since it gives you full size HDMI ports and since it has the internal drive when I bring it someplace to show people it's easier to carry and easier to show the output on a TV without brining the mini-HDMI to full size cable.

-Dave

Wow, that seems a bit expensive. Anyway, it looks nice, compact. Do you see any possible problems with temperatures and/or noise?

So I decided to put together an umbel box to compare it to raspiblitz / mynode

Hardware:
RPi4 4GB $55
Argon ONE M.2 Case for Raspberry Pi 4 $45
1TB M.2 sata drive $79
16GB SD card & Power Supply $15.00

So total cost $194 (+ tax)

Power draw during initial sync 1.1A


Still playing around with it. Will report in later.
VERY VERY slick GUI in my opinion.

Seems to be a nice build, I like the app store concept to add features / services.

Might be my new go-to node in a box.

-Dave

Thanks, I see the point for setting base to zero and having a percentage fee only. I will let that sink but I guess it boils down to concentrate on one of the fees and set the other to 0.


Good to know, I have tried that now and it turns out it was easier than thought and meanwhile I am announcing ipv4, ipv6 and tor v3 addresses (needed to compile the latest tor version as the one that came with the OS didn't support v3 services).

there are some people setting the base fee to zero because of a paper from rene pickhardt and stefan richter. i personally do the exact opposite. i don't charge a percentage fee, only a base fee

you can have both at the same time, even ipv4, ipv6 and tor if you want

Thank you for your reply and explanations so far.


Thanks a lot for that, I think I got it now how fees are set.
What I am still unclear is how the fee collection works, are you saying that if Alice pays to Bob over nodes X, Y and Z, X charges a fee to Alice and pays from that Y fees, who in turn pays Z fees?
Like in:
Alice - [X] - [Y] - [Z] - Bob
So fees have to be X^fee > Y^fee > Z^fee, otherwise somebody is going to make a loss?
Or if I am for example X, would I calculate Y's fees and add it ontop of mine and charge the sum to Alice, like in calculating total cost of a specific route?

Sorry for the stupid question, I just read https://medium.com/suredbits/lightning-101-lightning-network-fees-86abbbc17024 and I am none the wiser still.
EDIT: Just found this one, and it says Alice pays the sum of all fees to X, X pays Y and Z fees to Y etc.



Yeah I started to figure that negotiating channels with peers is going to be the fun part, almost like negotiating peerings in the old internet days. I was interested in the autopilot to a) get a grip on how plugins work in c-lightning and b) to see what it would do in dry-run. But I am all game for the social fun part of establishing channels  



That's something to start off from, thanks a lot.
And for the base fee, free/0?


Also I am wondering about tor vs. clear-net nodes, is it possible to "dual-host" a node on tor AND clear-net at the same time or do I have to stick with one or the other?

Yes, you can set two parameters for each channel: base fee and fee rate (also known as PPM - pay-per-millionth). The fee formula looks like this:

base_fee + (forwarded_amount * fee_rate/1000000)

When you route a payment, you receive some coins in one channel and you spend coins from your other channel. You don't charge someone twice for your service. The fee paid by the payer is calculated based on the fee settings of the channel which forwards the payment to the next node.


I am not sure how well c-lightning's autopilot works. I believe that LND's autopilot opens channels mostly to large nodes. That's not really what you want if you want to maximize your routing earnings. Looking for good peers can take a lot of time, but it's kind of fun.


That's a tough question. I wouldn't open a channel to someone who charges more than 100 PPM in most of their channels.

I am posting this reply here, it was Rath_'s reply to my post in the bitcoind, c-lightning and RTL on centos 7 (walktrough) thread and he rightly suggested to come here with my questions.


No, to be honest I do not seem to understand the fee system fully yet. I have a solid understanding of how the fees work on-chain but not in lightning. From what I've seen there is a base fee and a percentage of the amount to be sent?


Good point, I guess that's because RTL sets the on-chain fee for the funding transaction high enough to get into the next block at anytime and by doing it manually you can use 1-2sat/byte and just wait some time.


Oh plugins, that's one open construction site I still have  Didn't really work out yet, there are a few I would like to use, like the sqlite3 duplication and ev. autopilot but I can't get them to run yet. But I understand the general idea is not to care about the defaults, but fine-tune each channel so that it starts routing payments.
What are some ballpark figures for like dirt-cheap but not free and what are some upper bounds before it becomes criminal price gouging (yeah I understand, the network just routes around expensive nodes, but you should get the idea what I try to ask for)?


I am all in, just need some time to get more experience in operation of my node before I waste your time. I will happily get back to you by PM in the next days. I still need to finalize the setup in terms of DR plan / backup / resilience. I'll still need some assistance in creating this via rpc interface.

Thanks for the advice to move my questions to here, which I did.
I should have posted my questions here in the first place as you suggested, I only wanted to let mocacinno know how much his walkthrough helped me.

Oh, ok, good idea, actually. To set the fees to 0 and then, balance the channels and lastly set the fees again!

I'll see if my ring can/want to do that. I just created a ring with 2 other people.



Anyways, for the ones interested, Andreas M. Antonopoulos (@aantonop), Olaoluwa Osuntokun (@roasbeef), Rene Pickhardt (@renepickhardt), colaborated in another great work for the Lightning Network community. An online book. Check it here:

https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook

Hope this is useful to as many of us as possible!
Thanks to their great work.

Yup, I briefly mentioned this possibility:

i did once a triangle and we set the fees to zero after every channel was open an balanced the triangle so that everyone had a 50/50 channel. after that we set our fees at whatever we wanted