Topic: The Lightning Network node experience - page 4. (Read 3409 times)

Is your node up? Our connection dropped.

Here are the stats for November. My node has routed only two transactions: one small free-of-charge payment and one large payment for an over 200 satoshi fee.

The only thing I change is the fees.
The number of payments where quite higer because I had a couple of channels with both fee settings at 0 (base and fee_ppm)
In fact, from the 14events, only 5 were charged with fees. And from those 5, 3 of them are in the same channel with a pretty decent node (Boltz). I balance this channel quite frequently. Mayabe once a month. I'm actually doing it as we speak!

Here are my statistics for September. I didn't make any changes to my settings in the last few months.



As for October, I routed only one small payment, free of charge.

I routed 4 payments in October. 



Wow, 14 payments and over 1000 sats in fees is pretty nice! Did you change something between September and October? Maybe towards the end of October?

Here is my reports from both September and October

September


October

I only routed 2 payments in August!
Probably just too few and too small channels. Even though it doesn't see much use as a routing node at all, it works great for personal usage; so it's connected well enough to allow me to send and receive payments almost without issues.

Here is my report for August:

Here are the stats for August. Another unimpressive month. I have just updated c-lightning to v0.12.0 since it introduced support for static channel backups. I will play around with them and I will report back soon what I have learned.

Here are the stats for June and July. I haven't been paying much attention to my Lightning node lately - I rarely adjusted my feerates and I didn't rebalance any of my channels. I am sorry for occasional downtime. It took me a while to figure out what was was causing my Internet connection to go down regularly.

June:



July: 39 routed transactions, 34 (!) of which were free of charge.

I know my reply is slightly late, but you still might find it interesting.


I don't think that there are any paid watchtower services as none of the available implementations support reward watchtowers. The privacy is not an issue either. Watchtowers receive encrypted penalty transactions which can be decrypted only if an outdated commitment transaction is published.

Here you can learn about LND's implemenation. I believe that lightningnetwork.plus is the most popular altruistic watchtower service. As for c-lightning, I know that a watchtower plugin exists, but I have never used it.


You can't tell if someone tried to cheat or if it was an accident (due to a bug or an outdated backup).

I've played around with this recently on command-line and RTL. The latter is a little buggy, but it does work.
I believe it consistently sets the new fee policy, just that the old value is still cached. Or it delays the RPC call. In any way; if you set it through the GUI and check back a while later, maybe even after closing and reopening the dashboard, it does show the new values perfectly fine.

darkv0rt3x, in case you're comfortable disclosing this; do you run RTL through clearnet / local network or Tor? I believe BlackHatCoiner and me connect to the dashboard through Tor - maybe there's heavier caching due to slow Tor performance? Just a hypothesis.

Can you point me exactly here is that option to change fees? I can't find it!

Edit;
Ohh, I found it, nevermind!

Probably worth of opening an issue maybe. I'll try to change our channel fees to see if I have the same behaviour!

Edit 1;
Mine, keeps the setting. I had it [base, ppm] = [0, 25] and changed it to [base, ppm] = [100, 500] and then changed back to [base, ppm] = [0, 25] and after cicking update an open again the menu, the values were stick to the [base, ppm] = [0, 25].

Going to check in the command line, step at a step! To rule out any visual glitch from the frontend.

Edit 2;

So:

Step 1 - Change fees to [base, ppm] = [100, 500] in RTL. Wait a few seconds.
Step 2 - Check in command line:

Step 3 - Change fees to [base, ppm] = [0, 25]  in RTL and wait a few seconds.
Step 4 - Check in RTL if values are still there by going to the Update Fees menu again. They are still there
Step 4 - Check in command line

So, on my side, things seems to be working!

It allows you to change the local fee policy, but once I change it to [0, 25], I open it up again to confirm, and it says [1000, 25].

Can you set fees to a channel in RTL? Never seen the option. Never looked for it either! But I usually do these stuff from the command line!

Yes. It might work from lightning-cli, but not from RTL.

You mean this:

So, last month I have routed 315 transactions, moving a total of 5,066,008 satoshis, each moving 16,082 satoshis on average, free of charge!

I'm now changing the fee policy. The base fee rises to 1000 mSats and the fee rate (milli mSats) becomes 25. I'll update my forwarding statistics next month, let's see what I can grab that way. I don't know if it has happened to you, but I can't set the fee rate to 25 with base fee 0.

As I see it, I don't think fees must increase over time and due to more adoption, more traffic etc. LN is still quite new and in development. Failed transactions still play huge role in the network, maybe because we still have many people creating nodes just for the fun of it, letting them poorly managed and causing many bad routes, very small channels and very poorly connected to the network (seems that nodes can be kind of left in "the corner" of the network if owners do not care much to whom they connect to). Also, I am not aware if the pathfinding algorithms can be improved or even if dev teams are even consiering it. Or even if devs can, in the future, change the protocol, if a better method of pathfinding is found. But I'm not too worried, at least fo now. I have a small node, probably one of those poorly connected because I refuse to connect to very big nodes, giving them even more "power" (I see it as centralisation of funds). I rather connect to smaller nodes and try to help the decentralisation of the network in terms of where the majority of fund are (nodes like, ACINQ, LNBIG, etc and so forth).

I have some of my channels with a 0 base fee policy with a some non zero number in ppm setting to favour smaller payments. Still, I can find failed payments of 11 sats, which I honestly don't understand. I don't believe this is a matter of lack of liquidity anywhere in the way. But no idea why a 11 sat payment fails!

There are different kind of parameters to take into consideration. Well, yeah, since running a Lightning node becomes even more specialized, and demand for routing (to be more precise) rises, there has to be a higher price for it. But, as Lightning becomes more decentralized, by the entrance of new funds, from new users, there's more competition for routing fees (or economically speaking, greater supply) which makes the price drop.

There's something I hadn't thought in the past. As Lightning becomes more decentralized, we'll observe either more frequent routing failures (which won't last due to competition), or higher fees due to need for more intermediaries to route (since there will be little connectivity across the network*), or both.

*If the network becomes larger at scale, imagine the times a transaction has to be routed to be accomplished if node A is in one edge of the map, and node B is in the other.