Topic: The Lightning Network node experience (Read 3480 times)

This is correct and I know this formula to calculate what you can collect for routing a payment. What I forgot is which channel fees are applied for above calculation which you can then collect for yourself. Let me try to explain:

• you have peer1 to which you have channel1 with channel1_fee_settings (base_fee1 and ppm1;
• you have peer2 to which you have channel2 with channel2_fee_settings (base_fee2 and ppm2;
• an amount of 500k sats is routed through your node, coming from peer1/channel1 through your node and going out through via channel2/peer2 (assuming channel liquidity and balance is fine to allow the payment routing, of course);

Now which channel_fee_settings are applied to calculate your routing fee, channel1_fee_settings or channel2_fee_settings?

IIRC, it should be channel2_fee_settings, but I'm not sure (definitely not both, that I'm sure of).

There is a formula that determines the fee that you collect. It's base fee in sats + (amount being forward in sats * PPM/1.000.000), iirc.

An example:

Let's say you have 0 base fee and 300PPM. A 500k sats would get you 0 + (500k * 300/1.000.000) = 150 sats, if I'm not mistaken.

No, you can edit routing fees for every of your channels at any time (base fee and ppm). You don't have to wait for anything to happen.

I set the base fee for every of my channels to zero as I support the zero-base-fee camp to facilitate easier path-finding for payments. Usually when I adjusted the ppm for routing fees, I waited at minimum one or more days to see an effect of my change. Only if your ppm is way too low you may see quick depletion of your channel to usually one side.
For every payment routing two of your channels are involved, one incoming channel and one outgoing channel. I forgot, somewhat embarassing, whose of those two of your channel's base fee and ppm determines your routing fee which you earn.

I hesitated to change my parameters too often because I remember to have read somewhere that too frequent changes somehow degrade the "score" of your node. Maybe my thinking of this scoring is totally inaccurate or plain wrong.

But can you only edit the channel rates when you rebalance it?

There is a simple reason. March was a month that I barely played with my node. I think that is one of the most important reason.


I think there are 2 important reasons to make smaller nodes be able to route a bit more. Play a lot with fees, at least daily, and if it gets your node more active, rebalancing. And by rebalancing I don't mean put all your channels 50/50 (in/out) liquidity. I'll explain more in the next quote.



To complete the reply to the above quote and also this quote, my experience is not highly conclusive but I have the idea that if you spend some time thinking in ways of theoretically widespread your node in terms of connections, it may pay off.
I cannot talk too much about the size of the channels because I don't have that big channels. the biggest channel I have open right now by me is 2.5M sats. I had one of 3M sats in the past but I closed it.
But one thing I tried recently was to talk to a good peer owner I have and ask him what are his best peers. He gave me a list of a few of his best peers and I chose one of them (not the biggest not the smallest, some peer in the middle), went to amboss.space and looked to the channels of that peer and searched for one peer that didn't have any channels to the peer I was talking to and opened a channel to that peer. It payed off because I could route 2M sats of payments in like a week. Problem was that I had the fees too low and I end up paying more for rebalancing than what I got in fees.

Not sure I was clear about the above explanation but I'll try this way.

My peer is A. So, I talked to the peer with which I have the best routing channels. This peer is peer B. I asked peer B what are his best peers in terms of routing to him (peer B). I told me that peers C to, let's say H, are his best peers.
I looked to the size of this list of peers and chose one that was not too big nor too small. Too big peers like ACINQ or WoS or so, tend to deplete our channels too quickly and too expensive to rebalance. So I went to a mid sized one. LEt's say peer F.
Then, I went to Amboss.space and looked to the channels of peer F and searched of a peer within peer's F peers that didn't have any channel to peer B and opened a channel to that peer! What I wanted to do was to make my node to be a bridge between peer B and peer F which has a "connection/channel" to one of best peer B peers. Hope you got the idea!


No problem, peers are public once you have their Pub Key.



My node pub key is 03fef777d58a529df02a3fb267690e0c9033767b555cc1c63844bb2d3498789f91. You can take a look at Amboss.space and have an idea of the size of my channels and node. It's a small node. In total, I have around 0.34BTC in + out liquidity. My outbound is only around 9M sats. Inbound 25M sats.



I think that's common with smaller nodes. I'm there too, but it's not a fortune that we can lose in terms of routing fees versus rebalancing spendings. And with some luck you may even get on green.
Comercial noeds, let's call them that way, is probably way easier to get good income from routing and from the services they provide themselves.


Yeah, understandable. I have my node since around 2019. In Amboss.space, the oldest channel doesn't reflect my node's age because my oldest channel was with Boltz but due to some issues (probably stuck HTLCs in flight) that cannel was force-closed long ago. In fact, I have had like 3 of 4 channels with Boltz that were force-closed due to stuck HTLCs or HTLCs not resolved in due time!

I didn't do anything special other than closing and opening new channels and also playing with fees. But I also don't keep track of how many sats I spend in rebalancing. If I'm on the green, it's just barelly because rebalancing is expensive and you only get the feeling of how much you should set your fees for the green after you know how much you spend in rebalancing. Meaning that for instance, if I open a channel with 2M sats and those sats "travel" to the other peer, I know how many sats I earn with the channel but I only know if those sats are enough after I know how much I spent in rebalancing. So, this is always a not very fair game, at least for smaller nodes like mine.

A few weeks ago I opened a 2M sats channel with some peer. Most of that outbound liquidity travelled to the other peer in a couple of days. I didn't check how much I earned in fees but yesterday I pushed 200k sats to this channel again (from one other channel) and I know I spent 121 sats. I raised the fees a bit to 0 sats base fee and 390 ppm (or something like that) .Those 200k sats already moved again to the other peer and I only earned aroun 76 sats. So, I know, I lost  a bit. Now, I've raised the ppm a bit further to 420 ppm and will try to rebalance again! I know I'll be on the red but, it's a long learning/playing proccess!

This month of April I know I'm not very bad because I am with 3.6k sats of fees! Probably I spent like less than 2k sats in rebalancing!

Yes, it is well-documented elsewhere how I've been getting these too.

They don't need an invoice to send you satoshi. Anyone can send you satoshi over lightning by just having your node ID and keysend. If you're running LND, you can disable receiving that way with "accept-amp=false".

I wouldn't do it, if I were you. Just like email spam, but you're getting paid.