The Lightning Network node experience - page 4.

darkv0rt3x

hero member

Activity: 1260

Merit: 675

I rather die on my feet than to live on my knees

Quote from: BitcoinVN_official on January 07, 2023, 12:14:41 AM

Quote from: Rath_ on January 06, 2023, 11:07:29 AM

Quote from: BitcoinVN_official on January 06, 2023, 10:26:20 AM

First iteration, so keen to hear feedback what other numbers & stats might be of interest.

It would be great to see more routing related statistics like: number of routed transactions and average (routed) payment size. How do you adjust your fees? Manually or using some plugin?

1) Noted!

Will get it forwarded to our team and see what can be done about it

2) Currently all adjustments are made manually (done usually about once per day in average)

Later on as additional scale might come in, we might look to automate it further - but most likely via some (at least initially) crude "home-cooked" algos based on our observations.

You guys change fees on a daily basis?

BTW, these where the forward payments for November. 7 events and 6 of them were completely free of charge. No fee_base nor ppm. I forgot the ppm.

In December, for "punishement" for being too kind to the network, I made no forwards whatsoever! :|
Furthermore, I spent around 1200 sats rebalancing a new channel I opened to one of Bitrefill nodes. Also, there was someone from Reddit, kind enough to open a 2.5M sats channel to my node just because I asked him to dod so, so that my node would be globally balanced! Thanks reddit user!

BitcoinVN_official

member

Activity: 96

Merit: 18

Vietnam's Premier Bitcoin Exchange

Quote from: Rath_ on January 06, 2023, 11:07:29 AM

Quote from: BitcoinVN_official on January 06, 2023, 10:26:20 AM

First iteration, so keen to hear feedback what other numbers & stats might be of interest.

It would be great to see more routing related statistics like: number of routed transactions and average (routed) payment size. How do you adjust your fees? Manually or using some plugin?

1) Noted!

Will get it forwarded to our team and see what can be done about it

2) Currently all adjustments are made manually (done usually about once per day in average)

Later on as additional scale might come in, we might look to automate it further - but most likely via some (at least initially) crude "home-cooked" algos based on our observations.

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

Quote from: BitcoinVN_official on January 06, 2023, 10:26:20 AM

First iteration, so keen to hear feedback what other numbers & stats might be of interest.

It would be great to see more routing related statistics like: number of routed transactions and average (routed) payment size. How do you adjust your fees? Manually or using some plugin?

BitcoinVN_official

member

Activity: 96

Merit: 18

Vietnam's Premier Bitcoin Exchange

We have recently launched our dedicated stats page for our Lightning Routing Node (likely one of the largest over here in South East Asia)

ln.bitcoinvn.io

First iteration, so keen to hear feedback what other numbers & stats might be of interest.

(Our services currently allow for no KYC cashout into any Vietnamese bank account, we've also on the roadmap in the latter half of '23 to get our fleet of Bitcoin ATM's in Vietnam ready to use via Lightning (currently only on-chain which can make the sale process quite slow at times Lips sealed

) )

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

Here are the stats for December. My node has routed a total of 8 transactions, 6 of which were free of charge. My node was down for almost three weeks that month. I will do my best to find more time this year to manage my node.

n0nce

hero member

Activity: 882

Merit: 5834

not your keys, not your coins!

Quote from: AGD on December 06, 2022, 04:24:19 AM

Just a few thoughts:

Quote

* Don't create channel between 2 already connected nodes. (e.g. check via LN explorers)

While this might be true with some of the biggest nodes, sometimes opening a channel between 2 connected nodes can help with rebalancing. You are creating a triangle that can possibly rebalance within one or two hops.

True, good point!

Quote from: AGD on December 06, 2022, 04:24:19 AM

Quote

* If a channel isn't routing anything for a long time, close it.

Sometimes a channel doesn`t route, because liquidity is on the wrong side, or you need another channel with one of other node´s partners to see sats flowing through it. If liquididity stays on your side for too long, try to rebalance another channel with that liquidity and watch if the node pushes back those sats.

Oh yes, that was assuming a balanced channel (enough funds on either side to theoretically move if there was any demand for it).

Quote from: AGD on December 06, 2022, 04:24:19 AM

When other nodes are opening a channel to mine, I try to rebalance that channel for a reasonable fee and put my fee about 50-100% higher. Let`s say I pay 200ppm for the rebalance. I would start with a fee of 400ppm and go slowly (about 1-2 times a day) down in like 10ppm steps until a routing takes place. If a node doesn´t route anything for a few months, I pull all the liquidity to my side and close the channel.

Sounds good!

AGD

legendary

Activity: 2070

Merit: 1164

Keeper of the Private Key

Quote from: n0nce on November 06, 2021, 01:36:58 PM

Quote from: DaveF on November 06, 2021, 08:20:11 AM

Guess it's just what other nodes we are connected to and how much is in the channels.

Yeah, it depends a ton about who you're connecting to and also the size of those channels. To maximize routing and profits, some people actually manually monitor their channels. Some recommendations I picked up:

* Don't create channel between 2 already connected nodes. (e.g. check via LN explorers)
* If a channel isn't routing anything for a long time, close it.
* If a channel starts to get used much, but only in one direction, rebalance it so it continues being used.
* Look for nodes with much usage, but no 1-hop connection and connect them through you.
* Adapt fees up / down in the channels that are used much, like sometimes your fees are just too high; sometimes users keep paying if you increase them since you're the only route to some location.

This is just off the top of my mind, not sure if I can find the original 'list' anymore. We may just create a new thread for that. I don't feel qualified for it myself though, since I was never a big routing node myself.

With regards to 'LN node experience', I will post in here in the future when I find the time to write down all my experiences and make a concise but informative post of it.

Just a few thoughts:

Quote

* Don't create channel between 2 already connected nodes. (e.g. check via LN explorers)

While this might be true with some of the biggest nodes, sometimes opening a channel between 2 connected nodes can help with rebalancing. You are creating a triangle that can possibly rebalance within one or two hops.

Quote

* If a channel isn't routing anything for a long time, close it.

Sometimes a channel doesn`t route, because liquidity is on the wrong side, or you need another channel with one of other node´s partners to see sats flowing through it. If liquididity stays on your side for too long, try to rebalance another channel with that liquidity and watch if the node pushes back those sats.

When other nodes are opening a channel to mine, I try to rebalance that channel for a reasonable fee and put my fee about 50-100% higher. Let`s say I pay 200ppm for the rebalance. I would start with a fee of 400ppm and go slowly (about 1-2 times a day) down in like 10ppm steps until a routing takes place. If a node doesn´t route anything for a few months, I pull all the liquidity to my side and close the channel.

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

Quote from: n0nce on December 03, 2022, 12:01:43 AM

Is your node up? Our connection dropped. Tongue

My node is going to be down for the next couple of days. I might bring it up once in a while so that it can catch up with the network. I am moving again, sorry about that!

n0nce

hero member

Activity: 882

Merit: 5834

not your keys, not your coins!

Quote from: Rath_ on December 01, 2022, 03:52:23 PM

~

Is your node up? Our connection dropped. Tongue

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

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.

darkv0rt3x

hero member

Activity: 1260

Merit: 675

I rather die on my feet than to live on my knees

Quote from: n0nce on November 01, 2022, 02:16:38 PM

I routed 4 payments in October. Cool

(image removed by me for easier reading)

Quote from: darkv0rt3x on November 01, 2022, 02:07:02 PM

October
(image removed by me for easier reading)

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?

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!

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

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.

n0nce

hero member

Activity: 882

Merit: 5834

not your keys, not your coins!

I routed 4 payments in October. Cool

Quote from: darkv0rt3x on November 01, 2022, 02:07:02 PM

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?

darkv0rt3x

hero member

Activity: 1260

Merit: 675

I rather die on my feet than to live on my knees

Here is my reports from both September and October

September

October

n0nce

hero member

Activity: 882

Merit: 5834

not your keys, not your coins!

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.

darkv0rt3x

hero member

Activity: 1260

Merit: 675

I rather die on my feet than to live on my knees

Here is my report for August:

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

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.

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

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.

Rath_

legendary

Activity: 1876

Merit: 3132

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

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on July 23, 2022, 01:41:15 PM

So, you prefer paying a third party monthly to watch the chain in case for cheating attempt, wherein there's trust involved and you don't gain the same level of privacy, and not paying for a power supplier, to be sure you'll be running 24/7?

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.

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on July 24, 2022, 05:10:01 AM

Cheating happens publicly, not privately. You could open a case accusing me, with valid evidence. Anyone could, even people whom I've never talked to. Broadcasting a penalty transaction means one of the two is a scammer, de facto, and the honest user can prove the other guilty by showing their commitments.

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

n0nce

hero member

Activity: 882

Merit: 5834

not your keys, not your coins!

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on August 15, 2022, 06:24:03 AM

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].

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.

Topic: The Lightning Network node experience - page 4. (Read 3480 times)