Too complicated? No. For me, that's a very positive aspect. I want to be challenged, and if it were easier, I'd be overrun by competition (which is a good thing, overall).

Too time-consuming? For me, that's not an issue, and I don't think that will change in the near to mid future.

Too costly? Maybe, in the sense of hotwallet risk. I won't increase my exposure, even though I often feel my node is too small (or, rather, I think having more sats in my channels would help) due to the involved risk. If the exchange rate continues to make BTC more expensive, this most likely wll cause me to withdraw funds from my node.

Regulation worries? My node/name is rather public, hiding is not an option (anymore). I'll have to bow to the king, if the king ever asks me to bow.

Not believing in the LN? Maybe, but I'll let the market decide. If I have to pay to run my node, it's just an expensive hobby. The LN is far from perfect, but so far it seems to serve a purpose. But, of course, if an alternative comes along that interests me, I might reallocate my BTC accordingly.

I like Bitcoin core and running a full node to help the whole process because if I mess it up I can have my keys and still spin up a new node and access my corn.

Lightning on the other hand... I'm still running a node with closed channels and I have no confirmations of the closed funds for months now. It sucks. I enjoyed using my node but I had millions of sats and I did not really need to have them out there on a hot wallet

Anyway...

I'm stuck with Lightning and I've just put myself in pause. I'm tempted just to archive my node in it's current state and give it to someone.

I'm using CLN.

Before I had an issue 3 years ago with LND and channels disappeared. I got help from Start9 and my funds were recovered.

I barely mess with my computer anymore. I have a networked Bitcoin setup on a different machine and I just don't want to mess with it.

It's like a mental block. It is a mental block where I don't want to mess up beyond what I've done.

I've been using Linux since 1999 and I've played around for a long time but Bitcoin is serious!

I'm hoping that my brain will kick in again and I'll be excited to push through and make waves.

Thanks for asking this question.

Still running after 3 years 😎

I put basically 0 effort into mine, I refuse to do any channel management and just update to latest lnd every so often.

One day I'll shut it down and move to a ldk based node.

Had my issues with multiple nodes

Casa node Nodl Umbrel Raspiblitz

I still run a node but I scaled back the number of channels. I still believe in the tech but just the resources needed to get started is pretty high from a liquidity standpoint.

I've been running a Lightning node for 5.5 years now. I did once have to start again from scratch, my old channel.db was corrupted and in the process of debugging the error, I accidentally leaked my seed. But My new node is now almost as old as the old was when it died, and I couldn't imagine functioning without my main node. Every other month, I refill my channels by peering with Loop, then try to spend as much as I can over Lightning (easy here in Vancouver!). I do like the idea that using my own well connected node, I have very low fees for my payments in general, and I can "make some sats back" by selling the resulting inbound. I don't think I could run the node for profit, but it's good to see it routing payments every hour or even more often.

In short, we're too early.

I'd like to wait for a more secure setup so I can feel more comfortable putting up significant liquidity. I had a few forced closes earlier in the year, which I didn't think could happen. Then I learned a few things about how all the LN channels are linked by the nodes ID. So I'd also like to wait for better privacy before doing it again.

If I do do it again, it will be run as a business rather than out of interest.

I spun up a node but never ended up getting any bidirectional channels open. I closed them and went on about my day. Most of the reasons you cited were applicable, too complicated for a n00b, too time consuming for me to figure out how to do it properly, and I didn’t want to tie up that much of my stack to support it.

Too stressful

I started out running 3 LND nodes in 3 different geographic regions about a year ago.

Now I'm only running 1 LND node on a free cloud hosting offering. The bottom line is running a node isn't cost effective because the fees collected will never cover the hosting cost. Also, most of the lightning software is beta only and risking a lot in open channels does not make sense at this time.

Oh boy, this is embarrassing. I went on vacation for four weeks. During that time, I had a power outage at home, and it disconnected. When I came back, I.. well, I hadn't written down the password to access the raspberry and I've been too lazy to reformat and re-setup and re-sync since. I should get on that.

I lost my internet connection

I did not, my node is still running.

Did 2 good experiments for some years each, now waiting for the proper time and lower fees to do the 3rd one

Stopping running a LN node is going to be looked back on as a huge fuck up.

Expensive force closes, lost >$50 so channel closes, even recovery didn't work flawless (LND doesn't close channels from SCB). Will stick with Blink now and Fedi as soon as its reaady

Too costly I will add