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59 sats \ 2 replies \ @arrowdrive 30 Apr 2022 \ on: Why I can and I will keep my LN node fees to zero? bitcoin
Our main goal when running a routing node shouldn’t be profit. It should be creating a robust and reliable payment network that people want to use. Fees need to be low for people to want to use it.
When I was a noob to LN I was quite turned off at first because I would often incur fees that were much larger that even on-chain transactions for modest transactions between 500k–1m sats. I thought LN was stupid and stopped using it for a while. Luckily I came back to it after learning more and started running my own node with the aim to help grow this network and help keep fees low.
I will also keep my fees either free or very low forever.
The way I see it, is that if LN is successful and it onboards a large chunk of the population, the transaction volume will be enough for a node to be profitable even with very low fees. For LN to be successful we need to keep fees low. We are only hurting each other with high fees and it will slow or even stop growth.
It's possible that the lightning network, needs to incentivize the pro-bono hobbyist, with an element of gamification, to do it for the long-haul. Altruism might be insufficient. That is, it can't just be the yield on capital that keeps the network incentivized.
If we could reward this zero-fee behavior in an elegant way, that might make the zero-fee behavior more sustainable.
We can't pay for all of this zero-fee labor from transactions. That would just be an increase to fees and the mechanism exists for that. Then it would be a job. But we could extract rent from somewhere else, then route it towards the low-fee hobbyists somehow, in a way that gave them some level of pride (think, "I won the Zero-Fee Lightning Competition 3 months in a row!")
I wonder if we could make a kindof third-layer to bitcoin, that worked something like this:
- Create a monthly 50-50-draw
*. - People buy tickets, this creates a pot of money (Say, 1 ticket per 1000 sats -- just to start). Could also be a simple charity.
- Every month, some time+zero-fee averaging function along with some algorithm that doesn't become an extension of the amount of capital, routes the winning
**zero-fee hobbyist (or more likely a set of them) some sats.
It's kindof like, a value-for-value charity to gamify lightning. Sortof.
* This might have to be centralized for bootstrapping purposes, but it could totally be decentralized if the general idea took off.** I think we can transparently measure this.reply
My main "reward" by running a zero fee node, is that WE FUCK THE BANKSTERS.
Once we've done with that, we can start creating an incentive way to run these nodes and not ripping off users.
Like @arrowdrive said, sometimes is much efficient to do a tx onchain than LN. This is just stupid and in special in this phase when we need to onboard as many people we can into LN and make this network to flow a lot of liquidity.
I start in Feb with the "#ZeroFeeFebruary" movement and from then my node increased 10x the number of routed txs.
I even wrote an article about that, for each month.
And many other users contacted me (and post replies to my article) and thank me for this initiative, their nodes start moving way more txs than before.
I am in contact also with some users from El Salvador, helping them to run their LN nodes. And they tell me: people there are interested into transacting cheap as possible, but sometimes they get ripped off for a simple payment to buy pupusas. And they move away slowly from using LN.
IT'S A SHAME that for some sats earned by routing people get so obsessed into "earning sats with routing", their greed grow more and more.
As I said, now in the beginning is time for helping each others NOT TO FUCK EACH OTHERS. Later it will come the time for earnings...
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