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384 sats \ 1 reply \ @pillar 11 May 2023
As much as I don't think the blog post has an evil intention, and while I agree with most of what is explained, I can't help but feel it might misguide some newbies.
A profitable operation will take a lot of time, effort and capital, and even with those ingredients, the return will be probably tiny. I believe a mention to this reality would help manage the expectations of those readers who are not very experienced in operating lightning nodes.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bshell OP 12 May 2023
"A profitable operation will take a lot of time, effort and capital, and even with those ingredients, the return will be probably tiny."
Agreed. This article Nate wrote also covers exactly that.
https://voltage.cloud/blog/bitcoin-lightning-network/are-lightning-nodes-profitable/
I will add that near the end for further reading.
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288 sats \ 5 replies \ @BlokchainB 11 May 2023
I took this approach but over time it failed me for the following reasons
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My instance of LND was corrupted. I my fees were stuck at 1 sat base fee and 1 ppm for routing fee. Not being able to adjust my fees caused my channels to be unbalanced. Probably lost so many sats rebalancing.
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Routing over tor is terrible the uptime isn’t great. Channels randomly go offline
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I started this using a Raspberry Pi. I had about 20 channels. It worked okay for about a year or so and then it just became unreliable. At least two times a month I was power cycling my node to get it back online. With so many sats at Risk I stopped routing and just use it as a personal node.
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I sold on magma in the early days. It wasn’t a pleasant experience but maybe they improved things. I did make some sats but my fees were so low I was probably getting taken advantage of
I may try this again with a more powerful machine and a fresh LND install. Thinking of going with a meekrat from system76 and will follow this guide because I still have the desire to route
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @021da48107 11 May 2023
Do you know why your Raspberry Pi was going down? I used to use RPIs for things but I noticed booting them off sd cards was unreliable so I switched them to external usb SSDs. Eventually I moved to the 1L PCs (hp, dell, lenovo) used all over.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @BlokchainB 12 May 2023
I could never pinpoint the issue. I would even hook up a monitor to my pi to see if could troubleshoot but the only thing that would get my node back is a power cycle. SSH wouldn’t work nor would accessing it via the LAN.
I should have tried re-flashing the SD card but I just got tired of it going offline. Maybe I should use the same pi start completely fresh and see if I have better luck but a part of me thinks if I am going to be serious about routing then I should get better hardware in general
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @021da48107 12 May 2023
I had the exact same issues when I was running the OS off an SD card. I'd give it another go with booting off a USB -> Sata adapter with an SSD attached.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlokchainB 12 May 2023
I am assuming you can do this with umbrel?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @021da48107 15 May 2023
I know you can setup the RPI 4 to run 100% off of USB. Once that was setup you could install linux and install Umbrel on top of that.
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233 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheWildHustle 11 May 2023
Great Post
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