I closed all of my lightning channels and I'm shutting down my node. \ stacker news ~bitcoin

I closed all of my lightning channels and I'm shutting down my node.

4662 sats \ 45 comments \ @Nuttall 13 Apr bitcoin

After listening to

CD124: MUTINY WALLET WITH TONY, BEN, AND PAUL support dispatch: https://citadeldispatch.com/donate ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EPISODE: 124 BLOCK: 838478 PRICE: 1457 sats per dollar TOPICS: fedimint, self custody, lightning address, hybrid approach, nostr, social integration, subscriptions, the power of open protocols, bolt12, open source funding project website: https://mutinywallet.com website:…

09 April 2024 | 02:11:54

CD123: PHOENIX WALLET AND SERVER WITH CEO PIERRE support dispatch: https://citadeldispatch.com/donate ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EPISODE: 123 BLOCK: 837415 PRICE: 1530 sats per dollar TOPICS: self custody lightning, tradeoffs, fee burden education, full stack integration, bolt12, future plans project website: https://phoenix.acinq.co/ website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://citadeldispatch.com nostr live…

02 April 2024 | 01:20:46

I decided to close down my lightning node. It's still running now with the hopes that some 1,000,000 sats channel will finally settle but other than that fuck, shit, piss I am tired of the feeling that I am so stupid that I will loose money worse than than the Federal Reserve will devalue it.

So anyway...

Why not just run Mutiny Wallet and Phoenix and pay them to to develop? It's better than loosing sats and getting rugged. Sure, I'm a dumbass but at least I am playing the game.

Running your own node for lightning is not like running your own Bitcoin Core node. You fuck up your Bitcoin Full node and no harm and no problem because you have your seed....

You fuck up your lightning and, well, you are me but more salty.

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220 sats \ 6 replies \ @elvismercury 13 Apr

It seems fine if you want to quit, but if your main motivation is that you don't want to lose money, I wonder why you don't keep doing it, only with a small amount that wouldn't break your heart if you lost?

Even if you've been frustrated so far, it seems like you must have learned a lot and would continue to learn a lot if you kept a toe in the water. If you were no longer worried about losing significant money, would running a node be interesting, or are you so burnt out from the whole thing that you can't stand the thought of it?

160 sats \ 2 replies \ @Nuttall OP 13 Apr

I've been running a lightning node since 2021. Losing any amount of sats is dumb. I've got sats that have never and will never settle. It's a lot of busy work. I don't need busy work.

If there are developers doing a good job and I can have the service then that's great. But if my own node doesn't work and I can't figure out why, then it's not fun. It's not my hobby.

In the past I was out of town on jobs and my node would be down and physically I couldn't access it. Other times I would try to remote and my connection was too slow.

My point was that running my own node made sense if there was no other option. There is another option. I'm using two. Mutiny and Phoenix. One has Fediment and the other does splicing. I still have to keep balanced channels. No big deal.

If rather pay developers to do a good job than have my own node shit the bed and that's extra work.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 13 Apr

Yeah, that makes sense -- if there's no joy in it then it seems like a no-brainer to get out. My question was mostly aimed at the possibility that it started out being joyful, and then it turned into a chain around your neck. Crazy how often that happens. In such cases, often there's a way to get back to the joy.

Indirectly, that's what's on my mind in this post.

54 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall OP 14 Apr

Thank you for the link to your post!

Great stuff, for sure.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @random_ 13 Apr

#430794

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 13 Apr

Not sure what you want me to take from this -- it's a link to an entire paper. Can you narrow it down?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @random_ 13 Apr

Its a link to comment citing that there are ~5x the number of zombie channels as there are active channels.

191 sats \ 3 replies \ @tomlaies 13 Apr

Posts like these go viral here every now and then. I would like to see some posts about people onboarding to Lightning to balance it out every now and then maybe.

140 sats \ 1 reply \ @Catcher 13 Apr

People usually want to write about bad stuff maybe? I have the following solution - I have my lightning node and only open channels to services I use - WoS, Bitrefill, etc. In this case I

don't care about "profits", routing, as it's for my personal use only.
don't care about inbound liquidity. I use outbound all the time and when I run out of sats I buy bitcoin via lightning and move liquidity back to my side.
force close happens once a year approx, I consider it a price you pay for a hobby, as I see my node as something I do for fun/ learning/ free time hobby kind of activity

I've never lost any sat , only paid fees for closing, opening.

Does it balance the original post a bit?)

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall OP 13 Apr

I have 1,000,000 sats right now. Unsettled for almost a year.

I'm glad that your experience is positive and that you are successful. I'm successful, too, but not with lightning. I think have two different self custody wallets / services is great! Most of my corn is on chain and I have lightning to play with. I'd rather pay developers who are doing a good job than to do a shitty job and be salty.

I've been "playing with computers" since 1984. I've used Unix since 1995. Linux since 1999. And I've built and repaired many systems. I'd rather be outside working on the water building things that people can park their boats on or near. Inside computers are for business and that includes a Bitcoin core node, electrum server but not Lightning. Nope. It's, too big and it's a full time job.

13 sats \ 0 replies \ @KLT 14 Apr

I onboarded some friends and family to Primal and help them setup a wallet and did lightning transactions. They were blown away and Nostr was a nice surprise. Note that everyone I’ve setup with Primal have self custodial their bitcoin to cold storage and setting them up on Primal gave them a new found appreciation for being able to zap bitcoin to whoever they want from anywhere.

42 sats \ 16 replies \ @BlokchainB 13 Apr

@DarthCoin show this one the way

Having run many nodes and lost countless sats I still run a node because it’s money i actually own and control. I can make all kinds of payments and receive payments. If you back it up if your node dies and you have the recovery seed you will get your corn back. You might pay a lot in fees but this is the price of sovereignty!!

Those LSPs can go down or be forced to close your channels at any time due to outside pressure or governments

When you have your own node they have to physically target you to shut down your node.

It’s super early and super frustrating I get it but as the space matures hopefully you don’t have regret

171 sats \ 10 replies \ @DarthCoin 13 Apr

I said many times: Running a public routing is not for everybody. And is nothing wrong with that. My POV about LN nodes is here: #486306

10 sats \ 9 replies \ @026180d3a3 13 Apr

Except the original design of bitcoin was for all nodes to be public and private which made sure no node was "special".

220 sats \ 8 replies \ @DarthCoin 13 Apr

You are confusing bitcoin core nodes with lightning nodes. Lightning nodes are about liquidity and payment network. Bitcoin core nodes are about final settlement and verify the security of the network. LN cannot function without a secured base to settle. The mainnet cannot scale to a payment network without LN.

10 sats \ 7 replies \ @026180d3a3 13 Apr

No. I am discussing the PURPOSE OF THE INVENTION OF BITCOIN. If lightning isn't within that scope and makes certain nodes special, there is a problem.

The mainnet scaled fine. It just became a victim of its success.

31 sats \ 6 replies \ @BlokchainB 13 Apr

But it’s open source software. The people who developed lightning is their attempt to solve a problem. Where it goes from there it’s up to individuals. So far lightning works. Stacker news proves this. I can send you 5 million sats right now over the internet with no 3rd party risk or involvement

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @026180d3a3 13 Apr

Yeah, so was the original financial system. Making the same digital mistakes all over again isn't going to go anywhere new.

120 sats \ 4 replies \ @fiatbad 14 Apr

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Even if LN becomes hyper-centralized around a few major routing nodes, it's still many times more decentralized than the legacy financial system.

I'm not saying we should be okay with a hyper-centralized Lightning network.... I'm just trying to bring some balance to the conversation. We ARE NOT making the same mistakes all over again, even if some of the tradeoffs do look similar.

We all need to be cognizant of a potential Slippery-Slope-Fallacy, cuz it can happen at both ends of the debate.

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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Nuttall OP 13 Apr

Both products I described are nodes that run on my phone.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @Nuttall OP 13 Apr

Unless I make my own software, I'm still trusting others.

320 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 13 Apr

You're trusting others whether you make your own software or not. There is no trustlessness in a world where you interact with other humans. The question is who, when, and how much.

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @Nuttall OP 13 Apr

Well I've been using Linux since 1999 and I'm familiar with FOSS.

I trust a lot of things. I don't trust that my lightning skill set is very good at all.

It's no fun. I want things to work and I'll pay developers but using their products and if they do a good job I will keep using their products and pay fees. Just like people keep paying me to build piers for them.

37 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 13 Apr

Fantastic

75 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 13 Apr

I think that is a good plan. Anything on lightning is a hot wallet anyway, so you already aren't keeping more than you can afford to lose on it, and I assume you would do the same with your new setup.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @byzantine 13 Apr

unless you need lightning for business reasons and accept payments it is better to use other wallets to just make payments

60 sats \ 0 replies \ @clownworld 13 Apr

I like lightning now. It works very well for me almost all the time now.

However, I’m afraid this was always going to happen, because there was always going to be a substantial risk with a hot wallet server.

For those of you who don’t know, there is basically no way to run a LN server without having your keys on the server. There are complicated architectures like Phoenix runs, but they basically wrote their own node to do it and it’s not easy. If your server gets hacked, it can be drained.

I’m really not sure what can be done to make this better (although I’m not an expert on the minutiae of LN coding). Ultimately, I expect there will be a better L2 on bitcoin more like Stacks or some kind of rollup. That will let us transact cheaply and the same way as on optimism or similar networks.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @ChrisS 14 Apr

For me the point of running a lighting node is not to gain any routing fees but to be able to use lightning to pay for things. Did you consider this in your decision? The risk that I might get a channel force closed and have to pay on chain fees is a small risk for the benefit of being able to pay lightning invoices without a third party.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @abeng 14 Apr

thank you and i am sorry...

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zed 13 Apr

Thanks for the rundown, I was on the fence….now I know it’s not for me.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 13 Apr

Interesting perspectives, thanks for sharing! I haven’t gotten that far yet in my journey.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @IamSINGLE 13 Apr

Doing the right thing, I never considered it. Thanks to my miserable past 5 years, economically.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @039e7a238d 13 Apr

A lot of people shutting down their nodes: #486283

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 13 Apr

TBH, what I have learnt from my little to no experience personally, I don't take LN, or I can't accept it more than it lets me transfer little amounts of Sats to my Bitcoin core wallet.

I do it by sending them first to a CEx and then when I have consolidated a good amount, I transfer all my sats to a self custodial wallet.

Doing this for two years now and never had any problems. For me LN is only this. That's all.

I'm a simple stacker, HODLer of Sats with not much technical knowledge. I'm however very grateful for it but whenever I want to think of using it beyond, I always get to know some drawbacks for individual users. Businesses can use, should use LN full fledged.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @eluc 13 Apr

I can really ubderstand and the thought came to me as well. Shit happened with my node, see my reply to the other stacker below, and at the moment it's getting super slow for no reason but I love so much using my node and testing stuff with LNbits and boltcards, that I want to continue learning and trying. I'm also considering a second node on a more powerful machine, if I could be sure I can make it faster and more reliable than my Umbrel RasPi4.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @skreep_ 13 Apr

Smart move

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @nikotsla 13 Apr

Risk management. Good call for you.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @oldrtr 13 Apr

I don't know a lot about how Lightning works. Can you enlighten me on why you might lose sats when running a Lightning node?

120 sats \ 1 reply \ @eluc 13 Apr

A stuck HTLC transaction might make a channel unresponsive and trigger a force close that cost fee on-chain and if it happens during a high fee period it can cost you much more than the fee you earn in one year on your entire node. Or just the other peer fucked up and trigger some force close automatically or manually and if you open the channel you paid for closing. Also you can get some old channel commitment protocle that predefine force close fee at opening, if you end up needing to force close the channel (other peer offline) and you have sats on your side, you will trigger the force close but the fee cannot be change and might never get mined.

In more than one year with dozens of channels, the stuck HTLC close never happened, however second case happened and cost 80$ of fee at the time, third happen with millions sats on my side and my closing transaction was stuck in meme pool for 3 months with 12sats/vB fee, the fees end up low enough for it to pass but it was stressful. Thus the last one was mostly my fault, the other peer was not really offline but still we tried everything togheter and it was impossible to close it before fee went down again.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiatbad 14 Apr

Good response, thanks.

I've been running my node and managing my own channels for a few years and have never experienced any of these cases. But you helped me understand better what the potential threats could be.

I wonder if the benefits of using Lightning make up for these rare events that can be more costly than we wanted? Maybe we're focusing so much on these potential negatives and not enough on the positives, and it's stinting the growth of the network and scaring people away?

Just pondering here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @robertba36 13 Apr freebie

Yes