How do you know about my backup strategy? I'd say it's rather safe, but it's not connected to Primal nor my browser in any way. Please don't assume that I'm doing anything wrong. And if you do, please give me the option to acknowledge your warning once and for all.

Greetings! Could you please remove the constantly showing "1" badges? Thanks :)

Sometimes also on "Premium".

I guess I should not complain about a free service, though.

The LN internally uses 1/1000th of a sat, but when you close a channel, you only get full sats. Having lots of micropayments (or fees) worth <1sat can add up, though.

Here's a good blog series that explains the details: https://ellemouton.com/posts/htlc-deep-dive/

If you forward some HTLC and the outgoing channel is force-closed, your peer may claim those funds only by revealing the pre-image. If this happens after the timeout and if you didn't sweep the HTLC funds by then, this is still possible. However, if you forwarded the HTLC and failed the HTLC back upstream (towards the sender), you effectively lost the HTLC amount. To avoid this, you should sweep the HTLC funds as soon as they time out.

However, in other situations (when you're receiving HTLCs, or when looking at the non-HTLC funds in a channel) there isn't a pressing need to sweep the funds. In fact, I patched my lnd to avoid costly sweep transactions. This isn't necessary anymore, as lnd now uses a better approach to sweeping (slowly ramping up the fees, taking the associated risk into consideration).

Performance is fine. Shortly before the new compact database format was introduced I had issues because of the database file size, but this has been resolved years ago. I think ZFR would have worked with this updated version of lnd.

As far as I know you can't switch implementations while retaining your channels and/or node ID. I'd rather not start from scratch, a lot of how LN works is reputation based.

No. Given the non-anonymous aspect of my node (a questionable choice...) I don't see the point of restricting clearnet traffic.

I closed a few channels with bfx-lnd0 with almost all of the liquidity on their side. Having those parallel channels doesn't serve any benefit for me, I still have plenty of inbound liquidity from bfx-lnd0. This way I could get a few sats (to be used elsewhere) while reducing the risk of force closes and other channel related costs at a time with very low on-chain fees.

I'm using the rating system implemented in lnd-manageJ, see https://github.com/C-Otto/lnd-manageJ/blob/main/rating.md for details. If a peer has a very low rating (ignoring the first 45 days of a new channel), I consider closing.

See #922319

Yeah. I think a lot of this is due to private node runners establishing nodes, doing some rebalancing (at a loss). I'm not sure, though.

It appears as a wall of text with unstructured/random content. Technical stuff, policitcs, art, everything. Some things I find interesting, others I'd rather not see. The core idea, BTC integration aside, seems to be very similar to Reddit. On Reddit, I can more easily select subreddits, and my homepage is curated based on my preferences. I'd love to see that, but I also have to admit that Reddit is far from perfect :)

That aside, I think the default font size is a bit too small. That's something I can easily tweak in my browser, though.

I stopped the old server, copied the files using scp, edited the name and started the new server. During that I made extremely sure that the old copy cannot be started anymore (intentionally breaking stuff like deleting the lnd binary). Once the new server was up and running, I deleted all traces of the old server on the old host. That's it.

To add to this:

ACINQ, bfx-lnd0, bfx-lnd1, okx and kraken didn't make it to the top 10, even though I have/had channels with those peers, too. Size alone isn't enough, there needs to be demand, which Binance seems to have quite a lot of.

I'd say the best reason to run a node in the lightning network, taking into account the risk and all costs, is to actually use it. Businesses that depend on their node, or at least provide a decent benefit to their users by offering LN, don't need to care about the overhead. They earn money using some other means.

Yes.

Motivation is a tricky beast. There have been times where I read every single log line as it flew by, trying to understand the details, optimizing stuff. There have been times (more recently) where I simply don't look at any information of the node, aside from "is it still running". Nowadays, I just do what feels right, without any plan. If my motivation drops too low, I'll close the node. Luckily, there's a lot of automation going on behind the scenes, so my motivation would need to drop quite a lot.

I stopped opening channels to new peers a while ago, mainly because I haven't figured out how to find good peers. I experimented quite a bit over the years, sometimes with success, but not in a satisfactory and organized manner. Due to the size/popularity of my node, I get lots of channels from (for me) new peers, and I just keep those that are worth it. I need to take good care of my sats, and having them sit idle in useless channels isn't worth it - which is why the number of channels might be rather low. The channels that remain, however, are good (or new).

If I take a closer look at the top channels while including bidirection traffic (i.e. incoming traffic also counts as "good" if it leaves through a channel where I charge fees), the top nodes for the past 60 days are, sorted by profitability with the best peer listed first:

I guess you could say that larger nodes are better. Keep in mind, though, that not all large nodes are good peers. I've cut some ties, and I will cut more.

Regarding profitability: keep in mind that this involves quite a bit of risk (hot wallet, "beta" software). Furthermore, running a routing node takes quite a bit of skill. If this were an established industry, my salary would be more than what any reasonable node could earn - risk and other costs aside. It's a hobby. I'm fine with smaller nodes as peers, but ultimately, they tend to hog my sats more than larger nodes do.

That's a thread, no idea how to link to that

German: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/iban-finanzamt-rueckzahlung-100.html

I can recommend paragliding in Miraflores, over the cliff. And Ollantaytambo was also worth the time!