Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 43. (Read 33677 times)

apart from the WA Redmond AI analyzing all the phone-home data from Windows

Slightly OT to all of this but I was at my local Microcenter yesterday to pick up a few things and saw this:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/636691/lenovo-thinkcentre-m90n-1-mini-desktop-computer

Yes it's a bit outdated and more money then setting up a RPi or getting a used machine from eBay.
But it's tiny, has more then enough SSD storage, RAM and CPU (4C 8T) to run a full node, has space for a 2nd drive for mirroring, uses very little power.
It comes with Win10 Pro so it has Hyper-V if you want it.

And you can bury it under / behind something for security and nobody will know it's there.

Not saying you should run out and get one, but with hardware in general spiking up in price it's not a bad option.

-Dave

I would rather keep a watchtower on a VPS versus trusting my local ISP to maintain sufficient uptime. While both are rare, my internet goes down more frequently than my power goes out. If you keep regular backups of information needed to maintain a watchtower, if your VPS goes down for whatever reason, you can easily spin up another VPS in another region or cloud provider and have it watching for old channel state closing transactions quickly. Or better yet, have multiple VPSs by multiple cloud providers always running.

I am not sure what you are driving at. Dual-funding is currently supported only by properly configured up-to-date c-lightning nodes.


Take your time. I am trying to figure out how to use lightning-cli funderupdate which allows you to control the behaviour of your node when some dual-funding compatible node opens a channel to you. I can't find any detailed documentation about it except for a short explanation in the command line.

I have 100k sats there that you can open a channel with.
Just ordered some larger USB portable drives from Amazon to make moving some of the VHDs around easier. Might delay me getting the c-lightning up until the end of the week but it will make doing other stuff easier.


From the been there done that part of life unless it's a good high end server room UPS check it every 6 months or so. I have had the consumer line of ALL UPS brands (APC, Tripplite, CyberPower) not give any indication that the battery was dead until it just flat out did not work.

-Dave

right, I'm using a UPS because bitcoind can't handle power-cuts without revalidating some blocks afterwards. I'm trying to make my Pi node as low-maintenance as possible

I have just connected to your node. My new node should be reachable at 0273da0a525390c36857841e208f1d289275c76ebfa7ecfde697c6cbf4f235b4f5@fjpmf23cd2c6sqp7e4wzexa6ixkttl3jabivldakwq733tw634ymjbid.onion:9735 . I am about to fund its wallet and start reopening my channels.

We are in the process of moving out of our data-centers to one central one AND at the same time moving office space, so the only machines I can run my lightning stuff on are my own server and workstation. For the C-lightning node that I have I need to spin down some VMs and copy them elsewhere to make RAM & CPU available for it.

If you want to peer and keep a channel open in general I just made an on chain TX to my main node running LND @ 15 sat /b so it should clear overnight you can peer to it at
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735

Once I have the other node updated and synced I'll let you know.

-Dave
 

I am aware of that. I am already running a bunch of virtual machines on that server so I would rather not waste any resources, especially RAM.


Sounds good, but an UPS would be an overkill for the amount of BTC that I want to lock up on the LN.


I compiled c-lightning yesterday on my own without specifying the target version, so I guess that I am running a fairly recent version of the master branch. lightning-cli getinfo returns version: v0.10.0-162-g33736b8


Thanks Dave! The mempool is slowly clearing up, so I would appreciate if you could do it in your spare time. By the way, are you going to open any more channels in the near future? I would like to maintain channels with a few forum members but it would nice to improve my node's connectivity this way.

that's just saying what I said, slightly differently

the C language lets you control resources. Golang mostly does not.

c-lightning is written well enough that it uses resources efficiently. LND consistently has issues. That's OK is you're running it on an expensive server, and you only want to run one lightning node on the server.

Having used C since I was in high-school in the mid 80s I can say that it has it's own set of debugging issues when it comes to CPU / RAM problems.

I like RPis, I use them everywhere. BUT $100 machines like this are all over: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144041689234 just swap the spinning drive for a SSD if you want and you are way ahead of running a RPi3
A programmer I use in India has been getting the above machine with a 128GB SSD (yes I know you can't run a node on it) for under 5000 Rupees at a local shop so it's not just a US thing.
IMO you should be on a RPi4 with more ram anyway when running a node and anything else on it.


Agree with Carlton but if you want to test anyway, let me know and I'll spin up one of nodes running c-lightning and get it updated. Might take a day or 2 since I have not been using them for a while.

-Dave

with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway. Maybe running 1 or 2 LND's will prove useful for different reasons, I'm not currently in your position where I have a decent enough machine to try.

Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.

Try the clboss plugin for Lightning, you can dial down/switch off some of the features if you want to: https://github.com/ZmnSCPxj/clboss


wait till version 0.10.1, or compile/run master branch, the spec for dual fund has slightly changed. I'm hoping that the clboss plugin will seek out nodes to dual fund with automatically once the spec is finalized.

Thanks Carlton for your write-up! I have recently decided to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a normal server. Since LND does not recommend reusing the channel database between different architectures, I had to close all of my channels. I was thinking about using a different implementation this time. You sold me on c-lightning. I am going to miss Zap Wallet, though. Spark Wallet isn't nearly as good.

Would there anyone here be interested in testing out dual-funding once the transaction fees have gone down?

You forgot Groestlcoin (seriously, I even think to remember they were the first coin who implemented it).

It is even possible to exchange coins via Lightning, but then both participants need a channel for each coin obviously. So it's not a really "easy" way to swap coins, at least if you want to do it without a centralized intermediary.

OmniBOLT also allows tokens to be used on Lightning (on Bitcoin), but I guess you need a separate channel for each token (can someone confirm this?).

Litecoin and (I think) Vertcoin also have Lightning implementations, but in terms of usage, I get the impression they're pretty limited.  There's not nearly as much liquidity on those chains.  In essence, you'll find it easier to make payments with LN using Bitcoin, compared to altcoins.

Well, at the moment I believe that it's only available for Bitcoin. There is a serious problem with small micro-transactions in contrast with its forks. Litecoin for example doesn't necessarily need LN since a transaction costs up to 4 cents.  (~0.00000051 LTC)

Are you asking if it has been implemented or if it's possible to implement it? If we're talking about the second, it surely is. At least, for the forks of Bitcoin you probably won't have to make big changes in the variables.

The Lightning Network is a protocol, not a token.

seems like a mistake

because LND's written using golang, the devs are having to deal with golang's problems

1. Difficult to find bugs where the CPU usage has frequent 100% spikes
2. High memory usage, again where spikes are sometimes difficult to explain

using golang makes it hard(er) to control that sort of thing, and it's by design, because the idea is that the programmer can focus on writing the app, not on the subtle job of also making the app talk to the operating system

c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)


So really, these small rPi nodes (and bigger servers with more than one LN node per machine) are better off ditching LND.

It's becoming more clear this will be necessary as Lightning gets more actual use; I'm running c-lightning on an rPi 3, and when the network is quiet, all is well with system resources (I've got 2GB swap space on an SSD to ameliorate the low RAM). But when there are big storms of transactions, the gossip updates push the CPUs to ~ 50%. There will be even more bigger surges in future, I expect


If LND don't fix their problems before Lightning use gets more regular (and heavier), these little rPi nodes won't be able to handle it.

Besides, LND seems to exist to sell a bunch of services to you anyway (swaps and watchtowers), c-lightning is focusing on supporting a more peer-to-peer dynamic (dual-funded channels). LND is coming to represent what critics say about Lightning: resource heavy and centralized

Lightning Network for use with bitcoin only right?
Can Lightning Network use with other alt coin?

Can Lightning Network create as new alter coin and fast same?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/first-dual-funded-lightning-channel-opens


Dual-funded Lightning channels are now possible. Obviously once implemented by all the other Lightning implenentations, it makes Lightning usage more practical on both user side and merchants/services side. It might be this upgrade merchants/services need to actually start offering Lightning as a payment option.

And the entire communications chain has to remain active end to end until the lightning transaction has been accepted.
Each node only talks to the next one and then back. But, yes until it's all done each node needs to know the status of the next.

-Dave