Closing time

Orville is closing. It has been routing sats since 2021 when the blockchain was under 400 GB, but now when we are approaching 600 GB it'll need more storage than the 1TB. My little Raspberry Pi is getting tired too. Therefore, I am closing down most channels this coming weekend, and only keeping a few for private payment purposes. Somewhere down the road Orville will surely fly again with high hopes, reckless abandon and better hardware, but for now it will be in the hangar. Thank you peers! See you in Amsterdam on 9-10 October?

Closing remotely opened channels

I do not like closing channels that are opened to me by peers, but today I am closing two channels which were opened to me about one month ago. Mempool fees are low today, so it will not cost my peers a lot. Both peers are tor only with no contact info in their Amboss entry, so I will post my reasons here:

* There was no organic routing happening from these two peers to me.

* I had to set very high outbound fees towards these peers to stop a stream of failed outgoing HTLCs due to the zero balance on my side. This raised my average outgoing fee level, which I like to keep low.

* Even though the incoming fees for these channels were low, I was not able to rebalance the channels within reasonable expense limits. The channels were on the larger side for my small node, which affected my node’s overall inbound/outgoing balance.

Boosted by BTC Prague

Coming back from BTC Prague after 2 wonderful days amongst other Bitcoiners, I was curious to see, if all the lightning transactions I saw happening at the conference had affected Orville’s routing volume. And yes, it actually had! Lots of little routings of 2000 - 100,000 sats. If a conference makes such a difference, what will happen when all the lightning payment providers I met at the conference get more clients, and more small payments start coming through the network?

Orville’s volume got boosted by the event, and my enthusiasm for Bitcoin got boosted by the talks on stage and seeing all the different initiatives and businesses building on Bitcoin and the lightning network. 

Update

Orville is running Umbrel on a RasPi4. Some months ago, a new version of the OS was released. After reading about the many issues other Umbrel users had with this update, I was in doubt whether I wanted to do it, or if I simply wanted to shut down Orville.

It is my long term ambition to transfer to another platform where I feel more in control of what is “under the hood” than with Umbrel, and to get some more cpu, storage and memory on the node, but for now I decided to do the upgrade. Luckily it went fine, so Orville will fly a little while longer. 

A BIG thank you to LNBig!

During this high(ish) mempool fee environment I have experienced a few big nodes closing channels - even channels I’d consider relatively well routing. Those peers were, off course, in their good right to do so, but especially during high fee times, when a peer initiated closing of a channel opened by my node will typically cost me more than the fees I earned on routing via that channel, I do appreciate knowing why channels are closed. Was there anything I could have done better? Is my ex-peer open to having a channel at a later time?

Recently LNBig closed a couple of their channels to Orville. I was sad to see those channels go, because LNBig’s nodes had been good reliable sinks to me. I then learned that the “old” nodes were closed to allow for reorganising and consolidating nodes.

A few days later I got a pleasant surprise: 2 new channels had been opened to Orville by LNBig. They are…big, but THANK YOU LNBig for opening those channels! I will do my best to move at least some of the liquidity to my side. It warms my pleb heart when the bigger players recognise us little ones <3

Enough with the force closes!

I never expected to make profits on my node. I started it because I thought it would be a fun way to support Bitcoin. For Bitcoin to scale and to support the amount of payment transactions needed for wider adoption, it needs a robust, fast and secure L2 for small and mid sized payments. As a smart peer once said in a Twitter talk: If we believe in Bitcoin's potential to “fix the money”, can we then afford to not run a node to facilitate adoption of the Lightning Network?

In the last week I have lost 380,000 sats to force closes. 2 of my ex-peers are down to less than 50% capacity due to force closes. I don’t believe that the massive amount of force closings between otherwise stable and on line nodes coinciding with a chock-full mempool and high fees is a coincidence. If someone has wilfully concerted this orgy of unwanted and expensive force closes I wonder what their intentions are?

I have installed Circuit Breaker on my node to combat the floods of htlcs periodically coming in from individual peers, and can only hope that developers see the necessity of looking into these cases, where hard earned sats are pulled from nodes in a coordinated manner. Someone on Telegram said: “See it as a donation to the cause” - maybe they got into Bitcoin early and have sats to give away, but for those of us who are trying to hodl a decent stack of sats and supporting Bitcoin by running a node, 380,000 sats is not a small amount to replace. Also, please stop the BRC-20 craziness on chain. The Jpegs were fun - I inscribed a couple myself just to try it out - but stuffing the mempool with transactions producing 545 sats utxos at a 5,698 sats fee is not.

The high fees explained

Please do not close channels - the raise in Orville's fees (and a stop to rebalancing) is a temporary protective measure!

A few days ago my node force closed a channel to an LNBIG node for no good reason. Both nodes were up and running at the time. This transaction cost me more than 100000 satoshi - 36000 sats just for sweeping the 330 sats anchor.

Other nodes experience the same. Sudden involuntary force closes transacting into a high fee mempool.

The on-chain transaction fees are also high for no good reason - an inflow of non-creative and parasitic BRC-20 inscriptions are flooding the mempool and bidding the fees up.

As I write this, I see another potential force close hit in 3 hours. My node is up, and my peer’s node is up. I fear for the cost.

Until either the reason for these force closes is found or the price of mempool transactions comes down, I will not rebalance and fees will be high to discourage my peers from sending HTLCs through me. I apologise for not being able to be a good peer to you these days..

While we wait for mempool to clear...

Thank you for your interest in Orville. Again, please keep in mind that Orville is a small node with no intention of growing past 65-70 channels and has limitations in liquidity. My preferred channel size is 3-5 Mil. If you open larger channels where liquidity ends up on my side, and I cannot push sats to your node, I will close the channel sooner or later to create better proportions and flow.

In the last month or so, Orville has not opened any new channels. The on-chain fees are too high since Ordinals Inscriptions craziness was unleashed. Is it a passing fad? At its current intensity, yes probably it is. But mostly a fun and creative one. Now after 1 Mil inscriptions it looks like mempool is quieting down a bit - looking forward to being able to open channels at 1sat/Vb again.

(Inscription 343495)

Good Peers

Nodes peering is like dancing. With some partners dancing is fun, you are in sync, communicate well and dance all night long - with others it is just not a great match and the dance is a short one.

If you want to open a channel with Orville I ask that you try to be a good dancer - a good peer, and I will try to do the same. Here are some hints regarding what I would consider a good peer for Orville:

- Be contactable. Post a twitter/telegram/email to Amboss, so I can contact you in case of problems with our channel.

- Orville is a small node. Open a channel of suitable size (2.5-5 M) I have channels larger than that, but those peers I typically curated carefully. If you are a node with less than 100 channels and our relationship is new, don’t go over 5M. Unless you are Loop :-).

- Rebalance responsibly. Orville uses LNDg. I aim to rebalance so that I get fewer failed routings. Opening to LOOP creates a nice flow, but If you rebalance aggressively to feed sats to multiple LOOP channels, then we are not a good match. If our channel is constantly jammed with many outgoing rebalancing HTLCs from your node that do not become routings, then I will close the channel to prevent force closings with other peers.

- Zero base fee is awesome!

Lastly: Orville is a small Pleb node run on a Raspberry Pi. From time to time I restart my Umbrel or have an Internet outage, I am not perfect. But I check my node daily and when outages happen I do my best to get the node up and running again to prevent force closings and I am open to communicate with my peers. Plebs help each other. Plebs Unite. Happy routing!