The question is ambiguous. Which type of node?
  • private or public
  • business or personal
  • Only Core or also LN
  • self-hosted or remote hosted
  • what hardware I use... could be a damn server or a fucking mobile device.
  • you talk about cost of electricity / maintenance or also about the cost of managing the liquidity ?
If is a personal Bitcoin Core I never thought about that and I don't care how much will be.
If is a personal BTC Core + LN It doesn't matter, it is to secure my wallets.
If is a business node Then I have to see how much is the return to sustain the cost of a remote hosting or even a self hosting. Running a professional LN node is cheap and require investment. For a small merchant that sells bananas on the street will be quite costly to run a remote node on Voltage or whatever VPS + LN channels management.
You see ? Is really hard to just vote an answer that means nothing.
Fair: I meant personal bitcoin node (question covers whether you do it yourself or pay for hosting). I guess I could have added not a LN node too, but I think it is clear that bitcoin node is not a LN node.
reply
a simple bitcoin core node you can run it for zero cost. You don't need a fancy box for that. You don't even need a machine for that if want to go extreme.
I think it is clear that bitcoin node is not a LN node.
(For) What is then?
reply
If people mean a LN node they usually say LN node. I guess the set specified by bitcoin node could include LN nodes, but mostly, people seem to say bitcoin node when they refer to software that syncs with the block chain and they seem to say LN node when they mean an additional node that watches/manages lightning channels.
By the way: do you know of a mobile wallet that runs a bitcoin full node? (By full I mean pruned or otherwise, but that downloads and verifies every block)?
reply
Blixt and Zeus, using neutrino. Also Breez, but they will move away from that model to Greenlight.
What people have a wrong understanding of "running a full node" is that they have to run a dedicated machine 24/7/365. And is quite wrong that assumption. Just to "verify" your own transactions you need just a junky laptop with bitcoin core software and open it only when you need it.