One of my LN nodes is a few years old. I don't consider it a routing node, but I have a few large channels that I opened a year and a half ago, when the fiat bitcoin price was much lower than it is now.
This morning I woke up to find that it had more routing activity in the past 24 hours than it has had in years. I checked the mempool, but on chain fees are rock bottom low.
It seems too unusual a coincidence. I wonder if the recent fiat price spike has is somehow related? Maybe the fiat value increase in my channels?
Has anyone else experienced this?
I'm not sure there is a correlation.
Any other ideas as to why this is happening?
Is possible that some of your peers modified their fees. That will offer better routes through your node and payments found a good liquidity in it.
That's why I always said: choose wisely your peers. Study them for a certain time before you open channels with them.
Also a very important aspect for a public routing node (even that is small): RUN IT ON CLEARNET, no matter what. Tor routing nodes are totally trash.
Do you discuss this in any of your guides? I'm curious if you're saying this just because it's slow or there's some other reason.
On many
https://darth-coin.github.io/nodes/nodes.html
On this one for example I went in more details and other methods.
https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/lightning-routing-fees-experiment
Yes, I often I am surprised when my node has routed.
Some days it it is several transactions and then it may be a month till the next one.
Are you running Tor or ClearNet? I have personally marked it up to have a slow tor circuit as some of the hit and miss routing transactions.
ClearNet
Brave man! How are you running a clear net node? I want to do this!
We'll, it's an umbrel hybrid, and I'm running tailscale. I'm not doing that on my Start9 node, which I'm growing and has much smaller channels.
Ahh me too.
Maybe the fees are lower on your channel compared to others?
They are low. The funny thing is they have remained nicely balanced and I still have more incoming than outgoing without a ton of management. I also have not at many force closures, and can't even remember the last time I had one. Dumb luck, I suspect.
Or maybe someone just heard the prices creeping up and just wanted to check and move some?
Probably a repeat customer.
There is definitely some of that.
I am not aware of any new big integration that create a new flow of sats from one place to another, but my node is routing big time the last couple of days, even as a totally trash tor node ;).
It is possible to be back to writing activity after long period of inactivity this would happens everyone has offline commitment staff you are not the only person.