I recently started writing about my experience with lightning over at callousedcoin.substack.com. I've created a lite lightning node on voltage, moved sats on-chain to it, and now looking to create channels. Goal is to have inbound and outbound liquidity. Which nodes are best to connect to for routing? I know about plebnet, 1ML, etc but wondering how other people have gone about this. Thanks!
This is a sick thread I too am in the middle of creating a channel and looking at how big i wanted to also run mine through umbrel though and am attempting to connect blue wallet...was checking out zeus a while back as well but need to do more research. Node built from scratch super cool !
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Hell yeah! I think I'll favor Zeus over all other LN wallets once I get channels created and use its channel management feature. I already like it a bit more than others on aesthetics alone lol
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Can confirm. If you’re running a lnd node, Zeus is my favorite
I reccomend the best node out there, Zero Fee Routing. Open a channel directly or buy inbound at https://zerofeerouting.com/. As the name says, no fees, and there's also an option to buy private channels.
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Woah just checked out his site. This is great! Thank you.
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https://lightningnetwork.plus/ and https://www.amboss.space/magma are places worth visiting for liquidity. But the first channels are the hardest since you basically have no rep and ppl unlikely to form chan with u in that case.
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I found one person in my circle that wants to create a channel with me but not sure where to go from there. Thank you for sharing those resources!
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Get in touch with the plebs. They can help. https://plebnet.wiki/wiki/Main_Page
open a big channel and swap out half and then open another big channel with the swap out funds
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Do you mind elaborating on what you mean by "swap out?" My guess is you're referring to "Loop Out" but not sure. Thank you!
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yes if you use thunderhub there is a swap out functionality using bolt.exchange or you can you use https://fixedfloat.com/. and send lnd payment to an invoice that is then swapped to your own btc on chain address then you can use your btc onchain funds to open a new channel
for example, open a 20M channel with breez, send 10M sats to fixedfloat swapping to onchain btc then open a new channel to WalletofSatoshi
this gives you 10M of inbound capacity from breez while maintaining 10M outbound from WalletofSatoshi and 10M outbound from breez
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This was extremely helpful. Thank you!
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As a quick followup, how many sats do people recommend putting into one channel? I'm leaning towards 1-2M since this is my first time, but not sure if there are any drawbacks to small channels (other than less inbound and outbound liquidity).
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I think the average channel size now is 3M but the bigger you go the better you can manage liquidity and find that fee sweet spot where you can route and earn fees and not have to rebalance
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Wow, that's bigger than I expected. Thank you for the info
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