Cool! You are a good candidate to run a pleb node. I would open two or three unannounced (so-called "private" but not really private) channels to some well connected routing nodes.
The problem with small channels is that the reserves and liquidity really kills the usefulness. You have to keep some percent of the channel balance in the channel at all times. You also have to keep some on-chain funds not committed to channels to pay chain fees. You also need to somehow get inbound liquidity. You can pay someone to open a channel to you. They may close it if you don't route enough payments. Instead you could do a circular rebalance, basically open a channel and send half of the funds to an on-chain swap service. This costs on-chain and off-chain fees.
You also have to deal with keeping your channels balanced. Say you do a circular rebalance through a swap service, now you have 3 channels with $300 in each and a $500 upper limit on each channel. You can't send a payment for more than $300 because you don't have a single channel with that much in it. You can't receive more than $200 for the same reason.
Lightning is basically unusable for small nodes for all of these reasons. The best way to use it is to share a big node between lots of people. All of these channel reserves, fees, and liquidity limitations can be amortized among all the users. This is what LSPs and cashu nodes are good for.
Here's a really great blog post from one of the Mutiny Wallet guys explaining all of this and why they decided to build a fedimint wallet instead of a pure lightning wallet.
https://stacker.news/items/379225
vnprc
npub16v…umhgd
2024-10-16 23:20:38
in reply to nevent1q…cnt4
Author Public Key
npub16vzjeglr653mrmyqvu0trwaq29az753wr9th3hyrm5p63kz2zu8qzumhgdPublished at
2024-10-16 23:20:38Event JSON
{
"id": "35b64802e6cc0cf27144759632ac73ac12e23a4059b9a68d9fdc495d252fa314",
"pubkey": "d3052ca3e3d523b1ec80671eb1bba0517a2f522e195778dc83dd03a8d84a170e",
"created_at": 1729120838,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"455a169eb2175e84d2a8e79bb837ca3ee9d8e8a9a1bf78c911773b042ffbcbea",
"wss://ditto.pub/relay",
"root",
"036533caa872376946d4e4fdea4c1a0441eda38ca2d9d9417bb36006cbaabf58"
],
[
"e",
"d9c4b3ebc5278dd7c59f0620cf1071b4e0dd134f769b311ed47bed689d1ab1fc",
"wss://ditto.pub/relay",
"reply",
"036533caa872376946d4e4fdea4c1a0441eda38ca2d9d9417bb36006cbaabf58"
],
[
"p",
"036533caa872376946d4e4fdea4c1a0441eda38ca2d9d9417bb36006cbaabf58",
"wss://ditto.pub/relay"
],
[
"p",
"4c800257a588a82849d049817c2bdaad984b25a45ad9f6dad66e47d3b47e3b2f",
"wss://ditto.pub/relay"
],
[
"r",
"https://stacker.news/items/379225"
]
],
"content": "Cool! You are a good candidate to run a pleb node. I would open two or three unannounced (so-called \"private\" but not really private) channels to some well connected routing nodes.\n\nThe problem with small channels is that the reserves and liquidity really kills the usefulness. You have to keep some percent of the channel balance in the channel at all times. You also have to keep some on-chain funds not committed to channels to pay chain fees. You also need to somehow get inbound liquidity. You can pay someone to open a channel to you. They may close it if you don't route enough payments. Instead you could do a circular rebalance, basically open a channel and send half of the funds to an on-chain swap service. This costs on-chain and off-chain fees.\n\nYou also have to deal with keeping your channels balanced. Say you do a circular rebalance through a swap service, now you have 3 channels with $300 in each and a $500 upper limit on each channel. You can't send a payment for more than $300 because you don't have a single channel with that much in it. You can't receive more than $200 for the same reason.\n\nLightning is basically unusable for small nodes for all of these reasons. The best way to use it is to share a big node between lots of people. All of these channel reserves, fees, and liquidity limitations can be amortized among all the users. This is what LSPs and cashu nodes are good for.\n\nHere's a really great blog post from one of the Mutiny Wallet guys explaining all of this and why they decided to build a fedimint wallet instead of a pure lightning wallet.\n\nhttps://stacker.news/items/379225",
"sig": "c95f7589f6e22b55977cf65003482bd7778fe355758f736af41d61e2f897d2c80a1c989d6e63f3da8b004d19b3ba3dbfdc5d979fbd9d2822ba6a98463155a5ee"
}