Great explanation Ian. I'm looking forward to more of these videos regarding lightning channels and how to use the tools you mentioned, especially learning how to possibly make a few sats!
Great video, again. I am initially setting up a lightning node for personal use but may consider expanding it into a routing node once I know more about this. However, is there any instance where one can lose money operating a routing node considering the fees involved (and whatever else may charge your wallet)? Thanks.
That's awesome. I will say if the primary motivation for running a routing node is to earn a return on your sats, be advised it does take some time and attention to make it worthwhile (i.e. it likely would need to become a bit more than a "hobby" activity in my experience). I don't see how one would lose money operating a routing node except for some sort of irrecoverable crash in the hardware - so be sure to have your channel backups properly maintained! There is also the possibility of malicious channel closings by your peers, but there are watchtower services you can employ to protect against this and/or if you're generally monitoring things reasonably consistently then it's probably not a big risk.
Thank you so much! Needed this! If you're still wondering about where to send the sats I won, you can give them to charity or someone else. I seem to only be able to open lightning receiving payment code that is viable within one hour. :P
Let's at least give it a try my friend :) I know the invoice timeouts are a pain but I will try my best to check this and my Twitter DMs more frequently today to try and make it happen
Yup, running a proper lightning node takes a good amount of effort. Building tools that make it easier is a big area right now, but it remains to be seen how much easier it will become.
Great overview video Ian. Thanks. I'm looking to set up a personal node just so I can pay and receive in a sovereign way. Once the channels are up and running it shouldn't be a lot of maintenance right?
Hey Adam - glad you found this useful! If you're using this for sending/receiving personally, then you're right it shouldn't be too much maintenance. With that being said, I'd still recommend you familiarize yourself with channel rebalancing and ways to acquire inbound liquidity just in case you run into needing that in the future. You may have already stumbled across it, but the following video goes into this in more detail (though some of this is overkill since you're not running a routing node): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9IKEhMNiaKc.html Hope this helps
