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.