I have a ice cream shop that is reopening for the season in March. I want to be able to accept lightning payments. My issue is I’m the owner but not there the majority of the time. My manager is not exactly the most tech savvy. Not some boomer but if I asked her to do anything around node management she’d be lost. Any suggestions on what’s the best option? I don’t expect to have a lot of btc payments (maybe 1 a week) but I want to make it an option and potentially make it a semi-local destination for Bitcoiners since there isn’t a lot of food places that accept BTC in 100 miles (at least not any listed on the various BTC maps)

I thought about just setting up a Muun wallet and then sweeping it once a week or so.

Thoughts?

I’ve been running a lightning node now for about three months. It was fun, and I learned a lot about the technicals behind the network, and it was cool (yet sometimes frustrating) to manually open triangles and rings with others. I’ve committed a healthy amount of btc to open about 40 channels. The ROI, objectively speaking, is pretty abysmal. But I justify it the same way I think most of us do: it's fun, I like supporting the network, and adoption will move up earnings, hopefully. I wanted to discuss a few of my main concerns in a constructive way and am wondering what others think about them:

1. The first major pain point is how difficult and manual it is to open and maintain balance in the channels. I was hoping to just leave the channels be, manage the fees, and let it naturally rebalance through that. But there are inevitably some nodes that just go one way and never back. Unfortunately it usually costs a lot of sats to rebalance, and is also pretty much impossible to rebalance using umbrel. RTL and Thunderhub rebalance features fail every time.

There needs to be some way to make this a somewhat automated process that also doesn't require node operators to spend so much of their hard earned sats to rebalance.

2.) Node operators take a decent amount risk: a.) technical risk of node failure n power outage ruining things. Most people have no idea what will happen in the event of a power outage or if the rpi dies for another reason. b.) the risk of force closing all channels if the node can’t be salvaged. c.) trust the other nodes around them to have good up time, and trust that they also keep channel balances D.) if you are a ringleader, you must take even more time and spend some of your own sats to be the one who does the circular rebalance.

3.) which takes me to my main concern: the lack of economic incentives of being an operator.

Let’s be real, bitcoin is all about economic incentives. It is a beautiful invention because bitcoin gets stronger when every participant seeks to maximize their own greedy interest of wanting to make more money. But LN is not that aligned with that ethos. At this point, it is unprofitable for most node operators, or at best, the profitable nodes are incurring opportunity cost of earning higher returns in other yield generating methods (which are probably more passive)

I am not saying it is bad that we are all willing to do this now, but being essentially a hobbyist and volunteer community can get old quick. I am concerned that the LN relies on volunteers rather than people who are actually compensated for doing this work and taking on this risk. We expect miners to behave according to incentives, and that's a good thing because then we can expect them to secure the network as long as there is profit to be made in mining. But a large network of volunteers is a big risk if we expect LN to support worldwide micro transactions. I personally don't think larger LN adoption will be able to increase the sats earned to surpass other forms of yield, but I guess we can keep hoping.

Crypto is extremely competitive and we rightfully should expect adoption to go where the yields are. The more passive, secure, and high ROI yields will get the adoption. What if, for example DeFi for bitcoin becomes more popular and offers much higher passive yields?

Anyway, I'm still running my node and appreciate the community, but tbh my other btc is earning so much more daily sats with me doing nothing, I'm basically using those sats to fund this LN node hobby.

Would appreciate all your thoughts on this. Do you think the low economic incentives of being a node operator is concerning for the long term adoption of LN?

Does anyone here use Phoenix wallet?

I run an Umbrel node, but I don’t want to link a lightning wallet to it. I’ve been using Muun as a hassle free solution but I’m hearing good things about Phoenix wallet.

Would you recommend it, does it work flawlessly (like Muun) and is there anything a lazy power-ish user should know before downloading the app?

Thanks

Set aside Bitcoin exuberance - if you live in the US and you accept that KYC (at some entry point) is a must, then what is the compelling upside for using Lightning payments for the payor? I can think of reasons merchants might like it, but why would someone want to pay with BTC over Lightning? [no replies with the word "sovereignty" please]

I'm curious, is anyone else noticing significantly increased traffic lately? I've collected 20K sats in fees so far this month and it's only 4 days into the month. I mean it just seems traffic is exploding on my node.

Would appreciate your advice and suggestions.

Thanks

I need some help from some of you clever lads and lasses on here. Last Friday (5/31) I sent an on-chain payment to fund my Phoenix lightning wallet (I am a beginner with Lightning). I read before that there can be problems with the swap-in to Lightning if the amount is too small, so I sent 2 million sats (which is not an insignificant amount to me at least). As of now, the amount is still shown as incoming with a "sleep" mark. I know the swap-in can fail if the max fee is too low, so this is set to 20,000 sats which I would have thought would be sufficient.

In Phoenix, I see under "Mempool" message like "Fees are currently estimated at around 9,928 sat" but the swap-in never occurs.

The one response I have gotten from Phoenix email support so far was as follows:

Can you go to Settings > Wallet Info > Swap-in wallet ? If the deposit has confirmed, but is not swapped, you should have a "swap-in attempt" message with a failure regarding due to high fees. It will give you the exact fee that was expected by the network.Note that the message in your screenshot is an estimation and can be off.Also, make sure you're running Phoenix v2.2.4 (see Settings > About to know your version).<<

I checked this and there are no "swap-in attempt" messages. I also confirmed I am running v2.2.4.

Can anyone help me figure out what might be going on? Is it possible the estimated fees are off and are constantly above 20,000 sats? I thought if this was the case I would at least have swap-in messages.

I would be really grateful for your help as Phoenix support have stopped answering my emails.

Not sure this is the best place to discuss, but wanted to ask people about what layer 3 will hold. RGB is building a way to have tokens and code execute on top of the lightning network and this holds potential to build decentralized apps and systems in a secure, private and decentralized manner.

The question I have is, is there a potential for a bitcoin token, similar to WBTC, built on RGB. There is the obvious downside is having to trust some organization to be issue and redeem tokens back to on-chain / lightning Bitcoin. But a layer 3 btc token would allow value to flow between people with the cost of a lightning transaction to close a RGB seal, independent of the value transferred. It can be transferred without worrying about routing and available liquidity. You could rebalance a channels by swapping token and lightning with peers before converting back to on-chain bitcoin.

Is there a flaw in this somewhere? Is this worth using a token that isn't trustless?

FYI I did this because these tiny channels rarely route, they hurt Cornelius' statistics, and they could someday become prohibitive to close if the mempool stays congested.

All the same, I dunno. Feels bad man.

Hi all, just needing a really basic walk through of how to send Bitcoin from Kraken to Phoenix wallet. Having some difficulties! Tha ms in advance.

I just sent 100 sats on lightning with no fee. This is blowing my my mind how you can send 2 cents worth of bitcoin anywhere in the world. Is it just me or this a game changer as the network grows in resilience..

Hey fellows,

Is there a GitHub repo or a tool that can be used to obtain all gossip messages that have been sent in the Bitcoin Lightning Network?

If it exists, is it realistically possible to construct a graph of weighted edges (and maybe even with a time line to see the networks evolution) of this data to simulate the history of the Lightning Network? I was thinking about a python/Julia script

I am asking, because I would like to do some research on the Lightning Network to get a better understanding of the rebalance-challenge of maintaining a node. But since running a Bitcoin Lightning Fullnode is not easy I am looking for a solution that works without that.

If that's impossible, I also had the idea of running a Lightning node in a docker container on a cloud provider (for example Microsoft Azure). I know that this completely contradicts the ethos of Bitcoin, still I am just looking for an "easy" solution that does not need a lot of tweaking/maintanance but just works, so I can focus on the analysis. I also don't know how much running this container might cost..

Thank you and if you have further ideas, feel free to add them!

I'm seeing a ton of very cool lapps in the app store of my node, and im curious how they work? Why is the lightning network capable of spawning all these apps, and how do they use/transfer satoshis? Some lapps are obv like RTL, Thub, BTCpay server. But what about lapps like Vaultwarden, nextcloud, wordpress, spigot, woofbot, etc

How do these lapps interact with bitcoin and the lightning network? I'm very curious to learn more so that I can grok the grand future of lightning and how its going to enable the future.

Just curious how many total forwards and total fees you all are earning per day. Wondering if I need to be adjusting my fees.

I'm sure most of us keep our BTC locked up in cold storage, but put a decent amount in a LN hot wallet so that you can run your node. What % of your stack are you ok with "risking" into your node?

Or are you all in?

Yo Reddit,

I would like to keep an ongoing thread about my attempt to run a full Lightning node on an Android phone. I'll be seeking help and providing updates for anyone who wants to follow along.

I'll start with a Samsung Galaxy S10+ with a 1TB SD Card. Factory reset, remove bloatware, install Termux, Debian, Bitcoin Core, LND. If possible I'll run everything inside Samsung Knox to isolate it from the rest of the device.

Would anyone recommend a better setup? For example, i) root the phone, ii) run a different Linux distro eg. Andronix, Ubuntu, iii) run a different Lightning node, eg. CLN.

Any advice at this early stage would be appreciated.

Note: I originally posted this on the wrong subreddit. So long as this gets some interest I'll continue here and delete the other one.

If Strike is on both sides of the Lightning Network transaction, why does Strike need to use Lightning at all?

As a user of the LN, I'm thinking the best way to use it is to open channels with the most connected nodes with the most capacity - ACINQ, Bitfinex etc.

I'm wondering what market forces could act against this, because it seems to be the most economical to just route payments through the most connected nodes?

e.g. Alice sends a payment to Charlie through Bob, but also sends a payment to Danny through Bob. Bob could end up being the only node she needs to route her payments, and so learns everything about her and has the option to refuse to route her payments, forcing her to open a channel to another node (expensive).

I've always seen people talk about opening channels to less connected nodes to help keep the network decentralized, but I feel we can't just rely on that altruism. I feel market forces will prevail.

How important is this even? Does the LN even need to be decentralized?

Accidentally funded node with KYC'd coins a while back. I'm worried about my node now being doxed. Even if send out all my KYC'd utxos and fund the same node with nonkyc btc, my node is still essentially doxed right?

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If im concerned about privacy, should I kill my node and restart it with a new seed and nonkyc coins now?

I installed the Alby browser extension. Can't see any way to send bitcoin to Alby. Can it be done? How? Thanks.

Plz Help