What a long shaggy dog story to arrive at the LNBank plugin fucked up.

Running other people's code with send access to a Lightning server is inherently very very high risk. Lightning is not a safe place to store anything.

I'm pleased that nearly all my funds on Hive are locked up in a way that makes even an active key loss is far from catastrophic because of time locks and the ability to revoke keys.

Wow, I'm well known? 🤣

It's going to take a while but if Lightning still exists in a few months, we might just build a better LSP (which won't have to use Lightning as a back end for secure storage) than any of the LSPs that are stuck trying to juggle multiple servers.

I actually made the effort to go verify Al-Reuter's story. Found the original source.

What are they actually counting? I can send 1 sat for free to my own Wallet of Satoshi account (I have channels with them) and back again.

I dare say I could shuffle myself 10,000 payments or more if I wanted. Unless they're watching for this I'm not sure they'd even notice.

One of the joys of using WoS for testing (for me anyway) is that they charge zero fees if you have a channel with them.

This post looks nicer on Hive:

Yeah I know... I format these posts for a system with more flexibility where I earn a significant amount for posting and I can't be bothered to clean up everything here for a few sats more.

The fundamental problem is that if Lightning routing isn't profitable on its own, at best it will be performed by entities who will capture and sell information to pay for the service.

Can Lightning close up the privacy holes fast enough?

I don't know.

I'm not routing by design. Every now and then I try to encourage sats to move from one channel to another by adjusting fees but that's a distraction from my real business.

If there's no money in routing and running the network, the infrastructure won't be there or will be captured by SBF and his pals.

Thank you for your great volunteer work but that isn't enough.

Lightning will not grow to handle the larger transactions in any reasonable time frame and the requirement of putting at risk an amount of capital equal to the amount you need to receive is a big issue.

I run a gateway, about 70% of my flow by volume involves me sending out Lightning, 30% I receive it. I need to keep adding Bitcoin to my Lightning node. This I usually do by opening new channels.

I also know exactly what fees I'm paying to make transactions for my customers and the network as a whole is not as cheap to use as Lightning people would like.

The simple fact is because all of Bitcoin's inflation has always gone to miners and will continue to until it ends, Lightning will become increasingly expensive to use.

At 1000 sat/vB the only people running routing nodes will be centralised big money services and the whole network will start to look expensive to use.

Trying to run a routing node as a business has a slim profitability when fees are 1sat/vB.

It only takes a pittance's worth of transaction fees to send everybody's fees up to 16x that.

Lightning is all very happy for a closed circle jerk of rebalancing and hunting for forwarding fees (who knows how much of the traffic today is this? I've seen estimates of 80%+).

Those of us trying to actually build a useful system which does involve moving Bitcoin on and off Lightning sometimes have to think about stuff like this.

Look at the fees in the mempool.

Can you run a lightning node economically at 15 sats/vB. Perhaps we have to find out?