Topic: The Lightning Network node experience - page 5. (Read 3480 times)

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.

As running Lightning nodes will become a more and more specialized activity, and as the demand for Lightning transactions also increase more and more, do you see a future that would make Lightning transaction fees higher than expected? I'm starting to notice the same cycle over and over, in altcoins. I don't know if it's truly applicable in Lightning, although I have debated about it, to the anger of some forum members.

Here is my report from July. Completely different from previous month.
I should also say that I think I spend more in rebalancing than by earning fees from routing!



In August I already rebalance a channel twice and split the fees in half with the other peer and spent around 63 sats for each rebalance with did! So, I spent a total of aroun 126 sats and only got probably 10 sats! I have to increase the fees a bit on this channel!

When I posted my comment, I wasn't thinking much about possible hardware issues and failures (which reminds me to think about more regular backups for my node, indeed). Last severe hardware issues I experienced seem to be too long ago, seems like I'm getting reckless.

I'm kind of blessed with very stable power and internet connection, can't remember any power outage in the last years, nor any internet interruption which lasted longer than a few minutes or happens more often than once in a few months. Probably I shouldn't take that for granted. And yes, any hardware can fail.

For a watchtower I wouldn't use a third party service, rather use a virtual server which I run for some other services.

I get your point, but a node can also do an honest mistake. For example, cAPSLOCK here wasn't 100% sure in the process of restoring their node that the backups were actually recent enough.


It was possible that the node would get punished for restoring an old channel state backup, but I'd still open a channel with them in the future.

Also I'm not sure where to open such a case. I don't think that node operators who don't visit this forum would ever read it if I wrote it here, for instance.

Sure, but almost all nodes do have a reputation to maintain. If I opened up a channel with you, I'd absolutely not be incentivized to screw it up like this, even if you went offline for a few weeks. 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.

It does form a somewhat trustless rep-based network. Reputation doesn't have to do necessarily with being a cheater. If you don't go well with other nodes, like you get used to close channels very often or charge high fees you won't be likeable.

I don't think it is; that's a good question.

Here we assume the watchtower is a 3rd party. For me, that's not an option. I would use a server / computer of mine that is in a physically different location. It could even be a VPS. In case I believe that the VPS supplier might try breaching my privacy by looking at the services I run on it and the nodes my watchtower is watching, I could just set it to watch a whole bunch of nodes, creating some sort of 'anonymity set' larger than 1.

This assumes you're only connected to nodes that have a reputation to maintain. This doesn't have to be the case and for Lightning to be a good system, you should absolutely be able to connect to nodes you don't trust.

Very interesting! I'm not sure how many nodes this is monitoring (I assume all of them, by scanning for penalty transactions on-chain), but penalty transactions do appear to be pretty rare, especially factoring in that there are almost 100,000 channels nowadays.

Sorry if that's off-topic, but isn't the whole "use a watchtower" option obtuse? 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? On top of that, you're connected with people who have a reputation to maintain. Not only won't they choose to cheat because of the loss of money (from the penalty transaction), but because of their fame preservation.

Here's a penalty transaction monitor: https://forkmonitor.info/lightning

Well you can never know if / when you have internet and / or power outages and how long those will last. If you have full confidence in your infrastructure and your locktimes are set long enough, there shouldn't be much to worry about.
You should also factor in how good your backup solution is and how quickly you can spin up a backup of your node in case of a hardware failure. Like: how long does it take you to get a new hard drive (or even whole new server in the worst case), download the whole blockchain and install all the necessary software, and are your locktimes longer than that?
If you're not certain that you can restore a node quickly enough to punish a malicious channel partner in case of extended downtime, a watchtower can make a lot of sense.

When a Lightning node is online 24/7 why would you need a watchtower for it? From my understanding of LN only reason I would consider an independent watchtower if you want a protection for your channels should your Lightning node go offline for some unexpected reasons. If offline periods are rather short (say less than ~30min) and scarce, I wouldn't bother to setup an independent watchtower. (I might be wrong, though.)

I'm not sure I understood your issue.
From what I understood, you tried Umbrel and then you quit and tried Citadel implementation.
When you tried to open a channel to someone, you paid 2300 sat fee (onchain) to open it.
Then, you were told you could have paid 10x less than that.

Am I correct?
Well, on-chain fees can always be chosen by the user. However, it may also depend on the implementation of your node. If you use the raw commands from the backend, you'll have the choice to choose while probably some frontends, mostly those more minimalist may only have options like fast, normal, slow/cheaper.

In my case, I always go with the raw commands. They usually force us to read the docs and the learning curve is always rewarding in the future!




Not sure I understood this.

You mean what tools we use for rebalancing? Or tools to do what?
And settings for what? Are you talking about opening channels, managing them or rebalancing?

About opening channels, there could be a lot to say or simply not much. Depends on so many things and also your will.
There is nothing wrong with opening smaller channels nor nothing wrong on opening large channels. For me, a small channel is a channel under 400k sats (on each side). Big channel would be over 2.5 million sats on each side. However, these are only my standards. Others could consider a 2 million sat channel. rather small.

Only thing I can say is that the smaller the channel, maybe the smaller of payments go through, but still what one considers small. Another thing is that if possible, try to open channels to people which don't have channels open to others with channels open to you. This is the case of loops. I don't mean they are bad, but I rather open channels in a way I don't create loops so that there are higher number of connections, and therefore, the node may be in contact with a larger portion of the network. But this is only my reasoning. I might even be wrong.



There is plenty of information. I'm not sure one can give you a link where all answers to your questions are. This always been and always will be a matter or searching, reading, trying, fixing, searching more, reading, trying again and so on.



I use Core Lightning and RTL (just for visualization) but I do everything from the command line as I said above. I do rebalancing only very rarely, opening and closing channels I do it manually from the command like, etc.
I don't have anywatch tower setup and maybe I should have one. Maybe I do that in a near future.

hello , sorry for quote ,
i tryed umbrel in december ,
and actually im on citadel , got 5"000"000 sat on it ,
i opened a small chan with a dev ( from citadel ) ,

but total newbie , and i see too , to do automatisation for balancing ,tower ?

and thank's for information about triangle (ie A->B; B->C; C->A) it's writed.

any way for a small resume what to do for start ?

i opened chanel like nub ,with lighting terminal ,and pay around 2300 sat for open it
when the guy say me no ,use thunderhub and u can set 230 sat
  just here ,you want to help comunity and ur stolen ....

just my question can you resume tool do you use and setting ?
and what the key for open good chanel ?

key is shop because btc go to here ( comercial traffic)
to geografical user ? im in eu ,
may be one node on russia ( for the east ? , one in usa for the west world map ? )

i have made search , youtube got some video '(JonathanLeviBitcoinfortheMasses)'
but im not english ,speak too fast ,and subtible main are not correct ...

or any good site ,
with what to do step by step ?

because on umbrel or citadel ,
yes you can open chanel manually ,but you pay fee for balance or rebalance
and like chanel opened , you pay 10 time the price
than a normal/good user ...
and im here for help btc/network and not to be the pigeon ...
to pay 10x the price for chan .. because i use the defaut tool ....

actually im using LNDg ,in automatic
but i dont understand ,know the value to use ....
like balancing chanel , i dont know about autopilot or tower ,
or setting ...

pm welcome ,sure blur / delete all private info ..

( yes im on telegram from citadel & umbrel ,
but i dont get any help ....
all look are good in code / linux ....)

About wha tyou guys been talking, @BlackHatCoiner and @n0nce, I've been trying to change fees regularly as the channels balance changes. So, my strategy is that when a channel gets more balance on my side, I usually try to drop fees a little bit and within those channels, if the channel is bigger and potentially bringing more traffic, I set ppm a bit higher so that higher amount transactions may be charged a bit more than lower amount payments!