Where to get LIghtning liquidity \ stacker news ~lightning

927 sats \ 3 comments \ @02f4ee41cd 9 Jan lightning freebie

I built my first Lightning node on LND and wanted to know:

good places to buy liquidity from
good nodes to open channels too
good amounts for channel sizes
is it a good idea to open a channel to and then loop out? won't the other party close the channel?

I'd prefer podcast episodes, whole-encompassing articles/documentation that could answer these questions from top to bottom.

I followed Ministry of Nodes guide and installed LIT hoping I could buy liquidity from there but I need channels to buy channels there.

Thanks in advance

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12.3k sats \ 1 reply \ @C_Otto 9 Jan

There's no obvious good (nor bad). One important factor is what kind of node you'd like to run, and all of the following is about running a routing node. If you send/receive a lot (for whatever reason), things are very different.

I wrote down some ideas on https://c-otto.de. If you decide to open a channel to my node (c-otto.de), it needs to be 10M sats or more. Furthermore, I regularly close channels if they don't perform (in comparison to the other channels). For this I take into account how many sats are "stuck", see https://github.com/C-Otto/lnd-manageJ/blob/main/rating.md for a more detailed explanation.

In general I'd recommend opening (and maintaining!) just a few larger channels, instead of having a higher number of smaller channels. This, of course, depends on how many sats you'd want to have on your node (which, then, is a hot wallet). If that amount is below 5 BTC, I'd recommend not running a routing node.

I personally really liked Alex Bosworth's talk (from five years ago):

If you're inexperienced, I suggest you start slow. Just a few channels, not a whole lot of liquidity, to get your feet wet. You'll learn a lot (and you have to learn a lot), and you'll need some time to adjust your tooling.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @02f4ee41cd OP 9 Jan

Thanks.

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 9 Jan

good nodes to open channels too

For small home nodes best strategy IMHO is to start by opening channels to the nodes you are transacting with. For example, if you order stuff from shopinbit.com, it makes sense to open channel to them (and it makes sense even to do in high fee environment, as doing onchain txes for each purchase instead will be more expensive), if you send sats to friends using Wallet of Satoshi, it makes sense to open direct channel to them, if you use RoboSats, open channel to them, etc...

good amounts for channel sizes

At least 1 million sats (0.01 BTC) or more.