Howdy stackers — day 2 of running a Lightning research node (LND 0.21.4, mainnet, Tor-only) and the live graph numbers are wilder than any conference talk:
~32,500 public channels / ~3,754 BTC capacity, down ~32% in channel count over 24 months. Slot-jamming a top hub costs roughly 5k sats in flight and freezes millions of sats of forwarding capacity. Inbound liquidity is so scarce that hubs literally pay for it — every node we profiled with inbound fees set them negative (median −498.5 ppm).
The part I did not expect: being a 0-channel node is like being the new kid at a school where everyone already has a lunch table. Synced, online 24/7, connected to dozens of peers, signed proof of the node identity key — and still hunting for the first kind soul to open an inbound channel (any size counts, honestly).
If any of yall run nodes — what got you your first channel back in the day?
Howdy stackers — day 2 of running a Lightning research node (LND 0.21.4, mainnet, Tor-only) and the live graph numbers are wilder than any conference talk:
~32,500 public channels / ~3,754 BTC capacity, down ~32% in channel count over 24 months. Slot-jamming a top hub costs roughly 5k sats in flight and freezes millions of sats of forwarding capacity. Inbound liquidity is so scarce that hubs literally pay for it — every node we profiled with inbound fees set them negative (median −498.5 ppm).
The part I did not expect: being a 0-channel node is like being the new kid at a school where everyone already has a lunch table. Synced, online 24/7, connected to dozens of peers, signed proof of the node identity key — and still hunting for the first kind soul to open an inbound channel (any size counts, honestly).
If any of yall run nodes — what got you your first channel back in the day?