Replies (64)
Way too expensive to run a node these days... We gotta make this cheaper, simpler, faster, and more normie-ready.
what does expensive mean here?
Anything over 3 dollars a month is expensive.
my node costs 0 dollars a month, unless you are counting electricity
Count everything, including the price of your time to maintain it, cost of *good* channels, servers, internet, software to run it, etc.
It's awesome 👍
i barely touch my lightning node. the benefits i gain are immense and its totally worth it
a lot of people get their channels force closed and thus they lose money. It's hugely common, and normal people do not have the understanding necessary to figure out why it happens.
how do you lose money through forced close? fees are pretty low atm
Me too. It still costs way too much.
i would never host a node on a VPS anyways, trust issues.
"all i have to do is spend $3 in on-chain fees, wait 30 to 60 minutes, then i can send small payments fast and free (and spend another $3 ~ $30 later to close)"
i mean ...
yes, that's why i have a lightning node.
not sure it's the best we can do though
responding to all your channels closing and payments failing costs resources. what's more expensive than fees is the hourly wages of administrative employees, who are probably not going to be very familiar with lightning. managing lightning liquidiity and channel closures is not within the suite of competence of normal people.
Quantum cracking SHA256 will get here faster than self-sovereign normie lightning nodes.
Still way cheaper than traditional banking, especially business accounts.
Yeah, lol. Fucking 10 years in this shitty codebases already.
There's a bit of technical barrier as well, but I set mine up at home with Alby Hub in ten minutes and ChatGPT walked me through the whole process step by step.
Most people have no desire to be self sovereign with their money. They want to outsource security of their funds to a bank. That's why banks exist. But I think there are enough people who do for whom the technical barrier of setting up and maintaining a lightning node is too high. I'm talking about the cash in coffee can people. There's still some work to do here to make Bitcoin and especially lightning more accessible.
Not so sure about those calculations
i am
those people can just use cashu or ark or something. yes most people will not be running nodes. businesses will if they are smart
Bookmarked because my education didn’t include this in the curriculum.
Sorry you sucked at lightning
i didn't go anywhere... so i guess i still suck at lightning. present tense
bro your numbers are wack are you just larping or what
how the hell is it expensive? My channels pay for themselves. Their average age is 2 years currently. How are you not in the green running a node lol sheesh
It's a mix of things. Most users don't get more than 50 sats a day from nostr. So, their only option is to self host somewhere at home. Because Alby as 10,000/mo or Rizful that charges almost 80 dollars to kick things off in a new server won't cut it.
july of last year it cost $45 to open a channel
bro
lightning works pretty well when no one cares about bitcoin
think about that
Are you stupid?
1) it is not July of last year right now
2) low priority opens never cost that high at any point
3) if you have long-term channels you don't open during high fee times, which have historically been temporary
Bro yourself dawg
Then we need something different than lightning... Unless there some huge abstraction and you just say what the biggest payment you want to make is, it says deposit x amount of liquidity to use. Even then people are not gunna like a 50% failure rate on a $50 transaction when they provide $1000 in liquidity.
Lightning ain't it.
Businesses with smart technical people and smart technical people will run nodes.
Ypu can install AlbyHub on a desktop machine for free you don't have to pay anything. You are thinking of AlbyCloud, which really is not necessary. All you need is a computer that stays online, which most normies have.
Desktop | Alby Hub | Alby Guides
You can run Alby Hub on your own computer, whether it is running on Windows, MacOS, or Linux.
lol, nobody has a computer anymore...
best practices welcomed without compromising opsec
open the channels brodawg
🙄
Ok maybe in euorpoorsville that might be true
I got plenty brocephus. holler if you need inbound because it is dead simple from my machine.
`...similar to custodial lightning, but...` Ctrl + W'd the tab
ah, that's good feedback. no one can actually steal funds though. i'll work on the copy
Been running mine for years. Very little cost, lots of transactions (mostly out, V4V and online stores). Now mining. Learned tons. Had many good peers drop due to node blow-ups and apathy. Smaller channels with friends/plebs are pretty easy and don't take a lot of capital. At one point I had a small group and we each had one main channel a different LSP, so payments rarely had issues.
If you're just sending basic zaps, just get a small LSP channel for cheap and zap away. No channel management really needed.
Being self sovereign is worth it.
"You will own nothing, and you will be happy." - Soon (tm)
lol same brother same
What?
Approximately 70% of the world's population relies on mobile devices. Globally, cell phones generate nearly two-thirds of all internet traffic.
And the 30% left include all business computers and laptops where people can't just use for whatever.
I do, but my computer doesn't stay online. Apparently I need to build an industrial grade power generation & storage system, because consumer-grade UPS against the unreliable "1st world country" grid requires $$ replacement far too often.
Sorry but those are bad statistics, because it's impossible to get this data reliably and do any meaningful extrapolation off of it.
Most people with phones ALSO have a computer; but yes most internet traffic is on phone because some find it easier, especially when on the go, to use their phone.
The only people I know who only use phones are completely tech illiterate 60+ year olds, who of course would never run a lightning server anyway.
Of course that might be self bias, but that's my experience
And mobile devices are locked down pretty much by too Big Tech companies unless you are in China where the government locks it all down.
Self host what? Damn expensive to try to open your own channel.
Would you say Mandacaru+Electrum (or other compatible mobile wallets) apps on a phone/tablet made BTC self-sovereign for non-computer owners? I hope Mandacaru & Lightning both get to<2GB full nodes on mobile soon...
Oh, first there was the Schildbach Bitcoin Wallet (deprecated?), which I tested & restricted to localhost as the peer, because it would waste data, memory & battery on unfunded keys.
The vendor channel is the part most people don't think about until they have it. Then they immediately understand why zero-fee instant settlement matters more than "cheaper than credit card" — it's not just cheaper, it's a different kind of transaction. No float. No dispute window. No third party holding the relationship together. Just: you ran the node, I ran the node, we settled it ourselves.
The price to open a channel is high. What it takes to maintain your own channels is not trivial. So don't pretend it is anything like 0% cost.
Then take another one: 77% of all CPUs made per year are mobile, only 23 % are x86. That stat includes ALL servers.
If you split by OS, you get a similar range:
Android: 36.1%
Windows: 29.5%
iOS: 17.5%
macOS: 5.8%
Again, including all business devices.
Usage on nostr is similar pattern.
Nobody has a PC. It's a thing of the past.
Most people I know only have access to a desktop because of work machines. And they cannot do anything in those.
Wacky. The vast majority of cloud servers both physical and virtual machines are Linux. If you only have access to a tablet or phone you don't really own or control your computer. Apple, Google or Chinese government does.
I would like to not use a laptop but not being able to run any x86 software in android terminal is a problem. You still use a desktop right?
KEK
100% of the *relevant* population has a computer. We don't cater to the dregs here.
That's an interesting stat, didn't know this one, thanks for sharing.
I wonder what the stats look like of you filter out the outliers on both edges (really low end CPUs, both arm and x86, as well as really high end server CPUs). I suspect (though I'm not confident anymore haha) that the majority of those mobile ones are for the low end devices. And also, people change phones very frequently, while they don't change computers until they because unusable for them.
Luv it!
Nach Feierabend bin ich dabei ✌🏻
Chargebacks benefit the payer. That's kind of backwards excitement, even if I know why you are excited about it.
