Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 30. (Read 32079 times)

Sure, if you only have one channel and that channel is part of a LN ring, the rest of the network is out of this loop.

But nobody does this. As soon as you have multiple of these rings, everyone in one of these 2 rings can reach everyone in the other ring, since you run the node that ties them together. Of course this gets even better as soon as every participant has multiple rings or triangles and connections to hubs and other participants.

In general, a mix of hub, ring, triangle, individual connections is what I personally use

It's true that when creating rings the channels are single-funded and your 'balanced liquidity' is only 'globally'. It shouldn't be an issue with low per-hop fees, but if you want, you can balance a ring once it's completed.

Yeah, that's redundant. It is better to have 1 big channel than 2 redundant small channels.


True, rings start out unbalanced and need manual balancing. Dual-funded channels would be ideal.

Not 100% true now.

(I speak for myself) - With C-lightning you can open a channel that is balanced right from the start if you use liquidity ads, which were recently introduced.

They give you inbound and outbound capacity but in separate channels. I think it's always better to have balanced channels. I mean, it's better to have good balance per channel than just globally, which is what you might get from rings!

And what you mean by "redundant channels"??

A newly-opened channel only has outbound liquidity. Loops give all nodes both inbound and outbound liquidity without creating redundant channels. It might even assist in rebalancing.

Hello.

What are your thoughts about triangles and other geometries between LN channels?

I have the idea that these kind of closed loops of channels are bad for the network, because it's like if you are putting the entire network out of that loop. So, wouldn't it be more reasonable to spread the most possible our connections instead of creating those closed loops between channels?

If you were on clearnet it goes and changes the bitcoin.conf and all the other apps you have installed to use TOR.
If you un-check it, it puts the configs back to the way they were.
If you check it again, it's back to the stock TOR config.

As far I can tell with over a year of use it never touches the configs again. The configs are not even on the SD card but on the HDD, so when you upgrade they are the way you left them.

But you are probably better off asking on their github for more info: https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz/issues

-Dave

At least for raspiblitz there are no 'quick' options to change. If TOR is censored by your ISP / government you would have to change the settings manually in the TOR configs.

I can't check on mynode at the moment since I reformatted it to try Umbrel yesterday and had a few issues so I stopped trying. I'll try again next weekend unless I have some slow time during the week.

-Dave

That's good to keep in mind! I haven't tried yet with a good passive heatsink and no airflow, to be honest, maybe that's indeed not enough.

You're right. I forgot to mention. The temps goes higher only during IBD, when I eventually have to do it. Other than that, it runs smoothly with no major temperature issues.


Yeah that is a fact too. My RockPro64 chip is running a medium heat sink from Pine store, a small PC RAM fan (Revoltec brand). And it probably didn't even need, but it's always good. The NVME drive don't even have a heatsink, so, there's where my concern with temps come.

These are not PC towers or even micro towers. These are very tiny cases with a RPi4 (or rock 64 in this case) and the m.2 drive. There is almost no airflow so you do have to make sure there is enough to keep everything happy. Even a couple of watts in a tight space can get very hot very quickly if there is no air movement.

-Dave

Wait, since when is SSD temperature such a big concern? And since when does a LN node have so much disk I/O going on that it would get super hot?
I run 2 NVMe SSDs in a tower of mine with just simple passive heatsinks on them and they run just fine.
Just a heads up that you might be overengineering here!

I did my own. It's not ready yet because something got in the way in the meantime. But I bought a board of acrylic, took some measures (quite some trial and error, tbh, :p) and cut it, glued it with specific glue for acrylic, used some plastic bolts and threads to place the board on top of them, and I'm now (this is the part that is stalled due to some life issues) trying to program a small chip to control the NVME M.2 drive temperature, conenct the fan to it and then screw the fun as close as possible to the NVME drive chips. It will also use a thermal resistor to read temps and the fan will change rpms accordingly!

The ones I saw (cases) in the official site are too big, metal and expensive, for my taste. And don't even remember if I could mod them to reuse the old fans I had here!

And for those who are using a 'node in a box'

If you are using a Raspiblitz to run over tor it's s single click and a reboot.
For mynode it's insert $99 and click a and reboot as it's a premium feature
Umbrel also can use TOR, not sure of how to configure it. Setting up an umbel box is on the to-do list.

So if you are a bit twitchy about setting up / running a linux box you can still run it all on TOR thanks to the work of the people who made these devices.

-Dave

Kohas787 will be so happy that he can start spam-calling the nearest FBI office, and report that his neighbor is running a Lightning node from the basement, earning $5.00 in routing fees per week.

If only somene wrote a guide in how to run a Lightning node over the TOR network, https://stopanddecrypt.medium.com/running-bitcoin-lightning-nodes-over-the-tor-network-2021-edition-489180297d5

Hey, just want to plonk a link to this topic here for anyone interested in running a LN node in the USA:
Devastating "Infrastructure" bill in US - contact your representatives

Apparently they want to treat node operators as brokers due to 'facilitating transactions'.
Maybe worth following if you're located there..

Both of mine are running cool and the fan barely be heard. But, that's just my units.


Did you find / do you have a nice case that supports that card?
Everything I have seen is either big and expensive or looks like cheap plastic.


There is a line
#arm_freq= 700
With the above line commented out max by default is 1400, so if you uncomment it and put in a number lower then 1400 is will never go above that.

-Dave

note that the Pi CPU can be underclocked in /boot/config.txt.... somewhere, somehow



you can get even more control using open source BIOS, which became available for the RockPro64 recently (check coreboot.org)

About the underline statement, yes there are some issues but there is a solution. I can't tell it because I'm also not aware how to work around it, but I know it is possible. The c-lightning telegram channel is one of the best places to ask how to run a pruned bitcoin node and c-lightning. Sooner or later you'll get the solution.



Let me tell you about another great solution. And if you're willing to spend a bit more and use an NVME M.2 drive, consider a RockPro64 SBC. It's way faster than Raspi4 and it supports the mentioned superfast drives. The downside is one 4Gb of memory, even so, it's way better than Raspi4.

@BlackHatCoiner, this is towards you too.



My experience with my RockPro64 + Samsung NVME M.2 (128Gb) + 1Tb external drive (Western Digital), I don't complain about any fan noise. I am using an old PC RAM fan and a heat dissipator. During the hashing of the entire blockchain, what heat up the most was in fact the NVME drive. The heat sink did it's job along with the small fan.

In my point of view, LND pros is just the fact that you can open a channel towards someone that already opened a channel towards you, but C-Lightning have more pros. Lighter, less resources hungry, more configurable, and yes, the fact that you can write a plugin in pretty much any language, is a must! This is a door wide open for any dev to contribute. I'm amazed how it is not yet filled with people building plugins.

Anyway, I don't want anything else other than my RockPro64 board (raw Debian in it), and I install solely what I want, the way I want and when I want. Full control... Period!


PS:
Actually, there is a plugin to deal with C-Lightning + Bitcoin pruned node. Check here.

Sure, you can give it a try. Although, you will have to install everything manually rather than use some out-of-the-box solution.


I copied the block data from my computer. I didn't want to waste time so I started the sync while I was waiting for all parts to arrive.


Somewhere around one week. The sync was not even halfway through. It took less than a week on different hardware. See this topic.

C'mon no!

I'm waiting to finish the syncing of my node so I can install ElectrumX on it. I gave up on the node OSes, as I want to do it all from linux, command line by line. I was also facing issues with the outgoing connections; sometimes I hadn't even one node connected which was so annoying. Tried umbrel & myNode which left me unsatisfied. I am now trying Raspibolt which is better. (Due to the running from a linux OS)

I remember reading that it took you a lot of time in the past, but forgot how much exactly, so here're my questions for you since we have the same hardware;

• How long did it take to sync your full node?
• How long was it taking to sync the ElectrumX before you give up?