Thoughts on running a hobbyist node.

The days of "I run a node to support the lightning network" are in the past. The focus has changed, and now lightning nodes are becoming big business. Large commercial nodes have 10-20M minimum channel size, fees are maximized up to thousands of sats ppm, and big node runners close channels from "peers" if they are too small or on Tor, or just not profitable enough. It was never my intent to make a profit on running a node. I have a lifetime profit of around 4000 sats on Orville, and consider a break-even a success. My aim is to have a well functioning small routing node, and have fun with it.

In reverse

BTC Prague did not generate a lot of activity on Orville this year. But some of the channels which had been sources, and which had very low or no outbound fee, started to behave more like sinks and vice versa. This did not generate income, but it balanced my channels and filled up the “traditional” sinks. I remind myself that my measure of success is not the amount of sats earned, but a low to zero number of failed HTLCs due to insufficient outbound on the channels. If HTLCs happen, less HTLCs fail, and the node is not bleeding sats, then all is well. Now I just stop rebalancing and wait to see if the sinks will go back to draining mode.

Starting a new Orville node

Some things are the same as back in '21 when my first lightning node was spun up. Most of the old peers are still in business: Whales like LNBIG and Wallet of Satoshi are still routing sats like the champs they are and plebswapping is still going on at the LN+ site. Some things have changed. Fees are overall higher. Rebalancing is even harder now than then. 

I realize how different old Orville routed as an established node with many channels, compared to new Orville with less channels. I am fighting the temptation to open just a couple more channels to better enjoy the network effect - but then I remember the bad old times with high mempool fees and force closes. Wanting more successful HTLCs to populate my channels is a greed I have to resist. 10 to 15 channels. No more than that.

Syncing the blockchain

Got a new 2TB SSD and planning to spin up a new node. This time I will keep it small - 10-15 channels at 2-5 mil. sats each. Mempool is, however, a bit too busy right now for channel opening.

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