Definitely agree with the sentiment @djmeistro✝️ 🍊💊⚡️ #Noderunning is not passive income. It's not earning 'yield' on your sats. Most nodes will never be profitable. But that doesn't mean they can't be with some effort and patience. Most important factor overall is stability; That includes running on decent hardware (not raspi) and offering a clearnet connection rather than TOR-only. These two points alone will eliminate a very large percentage of avoidable forced-closures, which is *by far* the #1 biggest cost in maintaining a public routing node. #Nodelou🐈 is currently a month short of its 3-year nodeiversary, and is earning sats consistently every day. Many others earn multiples of this in far less time and/or with smaller nodes, so this is just an example. image ~MORE IMPORTANTLY~ My node is my sole banking/checking account and has allowed me to #optout entirely of fiat banking. It's my privacy layer on top of #Bitcoin. It hosts my own @mempool instance and my personal Bitcoin Core verifies my own txs. It also runs my @BTCPay Server that powers @npub1swee...ns6h, our farm webstore, and also functions as our in-person POS at farmer's markets connected remotely via @ZEUS. I use it to buy products online, pay bills, and send/receive self-sovereign zaps. I can travel anywhere in the world and access my funds with no intermediaries or restrictions. Even if it cost me to keep it running– the services and utility it provides in my daily life are absolutely indispensable over the costs of using traditional banking services. Not to mention tons of highly-valuable education and skills acquired, and a couple good #norderunner friends along the way! 🤓🤙 I never set out to earn from my node: I just aim to provide a stable connection hub for my peers with high uptime and low-latency, good channel connections, and try to set the lowest fees possible while maintaining flow and channel balance. The rest is just patience. #runanode Connection URIs: 03641a88d80a2a85bbecd770577aca9b5495616e9fef63d66ef2631b7cca1d395d@198.46.217.205:9735 03641a88d80a2a85bbecd770577aca9b5495616e9fef63d66ef2631b7cca1d395d@zteyygsobjvm32qkusrvq4clebfbb4b2iso2jto23kzxohfxkwedynqd.onion:9735 @Amboss: h/t @Derek Ross @The Daniel 🖖 @Nodestrich ♾️ View quoted note →

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Some risk? Sir, you have approaching 15 Bitcoin in total capacity. Even assuming only ~1/2 of that is on your side of any given channel, that is far more money in a hot wallet than most plebs even own, let alone would be willing to have in a hot wallet. So it's not just time and effort and decent hardware that is needed to run a profitable routing node. It's also a decent amount of capital outside of cold storage.
😱Forced closures? I started my node back in the 1 sat/vB days had it on easy mode for the 1st year and a half so plenty time to learn without FCs wrecking everything. But then that fee spike last year wiped out pretty much all previous profits and I had to grind back slowly this year. Noderunning is a wild ride, definitely not for the faint of heart 😆