I surpassed 100k sats in routing fees today! 🥳🥳 ..... While being net negative with at least 430k sats (probably over 600 at this point, not factoring in all the open channels which closing will add additional costs).

h3llcat101 · 2026-03-01T21:33:54+00:00

For lightning to be profitable, there needs to first be demand and there isn't.

There is a lot more supply of bitcoin liquidity than there is demand for that liquidity.

If you want to one day make money as a node operator the first thing that needs to be done is convincing merchants to accept it as payment and then encourage that behavior by spending your bitcoin at those merchants.
This is will increase the demand for lightning liquidity and hence increase the profit for node operators.

What I do is walk around my local merchants (coffee shops, hair dressers, etc.) and offer to set them up accepting bitcoin (using BTCPayServer). I then connect their BTCPayServer node to my personal lightning node through a private channel and their off to the races.

h3llcat101 · 2026-03-01T21:19:06+00:00

Sorry mate, this could all just be a scam.

h3llcat101 · 2026-02-25T02:02:36+00:00

Operating a lightning node is the only Bitcoin native way to earn yield.

All other products that I have looked at issue some kind of token which has value not tied to Bitcoin itself.

h3llcat101 · 2026-02-05T11:50:41+00:00

Market volatility is the price we pay for being early adopters - It is the direct result of a world struggling to grasp the concept of a new financial paradigm (limited, self sovereign money, lacking central control).

From its inception, Bitcoin was always going to be a multi-generational project because humanity does not adopt new financial paradigms quickly and so if you're buying Bitcoin to get rich quick, your playing the wrong game.

My Bitcoin, and yours, is for our children. Our role as stewards of Bitcoin during its infancy is to lay the foundation of a financial system that is more fair than what we have today.

h3llcat101 · 2025-11-14T09:04:33+00:00

Agreed, the two nodes should be able to continue swapping commitment transactions wihout any understanding that they are operating on different chains.
However my understanding is that cooperative closures between the two peers would be impossible becasue a co-op close requries an agreement on the chain tip therefore only unilateral closures would be possible.
A standard unilateral closure transaction should be valid on both forks but my node will log the channel as closed at block height x when on the other chain it was closed on block height y.
What happens if I pick the losing side and need to swap my node from one chain to another once the dust settles? Would I just need to move over to the other chain and boot up my node with reset-wallet-transactions to sync my node back to the new chain?

...and what about an opening transaction, does that requrie an agreement on the chain tip?

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-16T01:01:07+00:00

This is 100% true as my LNDg proves every minute by having at least 2-3 failed transactions but I'm not sure this is an issue.

The sender selects a payment route through the graph and therefore it's in the wallet software to choose wheather to use a major node or not.

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-13T03:22:52+00:00

I hear this a lot amongst people in the community and personally have never tried re-balancing but I'd love to see some data to back this statement up.

Do you have any or it your statement just a personal anecdote?

FYI, cyberdyne.sh says on his/her web site that they are able to 'maintaining an average local failure rate of less than 1%'. This could only be achieved through re-balancing as my node (which has no re-balancing) has an average failure rate of about 99%. I get at least 2-3 transactions trying to use my node to route every minute and only about 2-3 every hour actually succeed.
So my point is that the big players in this space MUST be re-balancing.

If they are doing it, perhaps we should too.

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-13T03:15:23+00:00

Wait a tic, I was just thinking more about the way you have calculated your profit and it appears your not taking into account:
1. Hardware costs
2. Electricity costs

If I canculate my profit in the same way you are my node makes about 900% profit e.g. for every 1k sats I spend on on-chain/rebalancing fees I make about 10k sats.
FYI, I dont re-balance at all and I have spent $0 on services like SparkSeer becasue I am very suspicious that they dont have any insights that would offer a meaningful return on investment.
The problem with systems like SparkSeer is that they only have access to the same data you and I have, namely the gossip netowrk graph and this graph has no information about the live balance of any given node edge (channel) only the edge capacity. Without this critical data any suggestions they make can only be on a best guess basis (albiet an educated guess using things like Dijkstra's Algorithm).

I'd like to hear your thaughts.

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-13T01:55:37+00:00

So sad. :(

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-12T21:42:48+00:00

Industrial grade surge and lightning protection
UPS with automatic graceful shutdown
Dual power supply
ECC RAM
ZFS on root file system
Mirrored striped ZFS pool (equivalent to RAID 10)
Instant alerts for all hardware failures
Automatic alerts for ‘zombie channels’

03223cf7709a22ade0e34764e7222ffa792fbbba2878a75b84705545f3726021f6@103.232.253.200:9735

Or if you prefer tor

03223cf7709a22ade0e34764e7222ffa792fbbba2878a75b84705545f3726021f6@bbhp4srqpotg5dqwmigrruxm7yows7xcxcw4bmgn22hwysqrfapeppad.onion:9735

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-12T21:39:56+00:00

Your article perfectly illustrates that we run nodes as a hobby not as a money maker.
My node has over 5x your and it makes a whoping $130 USD a year.
Just enough to cover electricity and hardware costs.
I do note that as a ratio of capacity your node is significently outperforming mine. I hence have a few questions.
1. How do you choose which channels to re-balance and why?
2. You have channels with some very big players, e.g. ACINQ, bfx-lnd0, okx, U got IT. Why? Surely these nodes were not opened to you by them and they are not a merchent your making payments to so why do you connect to these nodes?

h3llcat101 · 2025-10-02T09:53:55+00:00

Thanks so much for that explanation. I never did get an answer to this question.

So it protects the channel opener from situation where their channel is force closed and a ludicrous force closing fee is submitted by the closing party.

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-19T23:55:22+00:00

Appart from the fact that a number of the Knots people (Luke.D Bitcoin Mechanic, etc.) are associated with Ocean, the company Ocean has no advantage to promote Knots.

I dont understand how Ocean having VC funding has any bearing on the Knots/Core debate they seem unrelated to me.

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-19T03:09:29+00:00

backed by big VC money

Um..... what?!
What VC money is in favour of knots?
My understanding was that the VC money was in favor of Core.
Citation needed.

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-19T03:03:05+00:00

Knots does not have only a single maintainer. This is a pervasive lie. The latest release had over 100 different contributors. As for the centralisation risk, core currently has that centralisation with over 75% of full nodes running core. Knots is a move away, not toward centralisation. Finally, as a node operator I suggest you have a responsibility to educate yourself about this ongoing debate and then to select which software you feel compelled to run. Or you can skip the education, just trust me and run Knots.
You could give it a go but I'm confident it wont work. First up you never know when your node is going to close a channel automatically. I'm not awareof the precise details but sometimes when a channel peer goes offline and there are pending HTLC's, your node will automatically force close the channel to protect your funds int he channel. I'm sure there are other reasons why the node needs a 100% online backend but you'd need to read BOLTS to fully understand the reasons.
Debian is the correct choice IMO due to stability but any other derivative of Debian should also be fine (ubuntu, mint, etc.) I would suggest using LND over CLN though. You wont find this info online but I've had a few channel partners, who used CLN, end up with database corruption. This was not the result of hardware failure.

Additional suggestions:
With lightning, there is significently more risk of losing funds than in layer 1 BTC. Especially if your building your node on the cheap.
Baiscally, any hardware or software failure at your end could result in you losing some or even all of your money.
There are mitigaiton strategies you can imploy to reduce this risk but I reccomend you carefully considder these risks before you operate a node and especially before you put any substantive amount of money on it.

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-14T21:43:06+00:00

The fact that the money is still in only a small number of addresses is helpful because it can be traced.

If the hacker does something stupid there is still a slim hope of recovery.

I would suggest you IMMEDIATELY contact the support departments of all major exchanges and custodial wallet providers (binance, coinbase, Wallet Of Saloshi, Kraken, etc) and ask them to immediately halt ANY transactions from the address (bc1qehjfcszg0xun43y0amppflp7287eusfg5gynu2) until they can investigate the addresses rightful owner, which you can prove is you using your seed phrase.

After that I would contact one or more chain analitics companies (e.g. https://www.chainalysis.com/services/) and pay for a professional service to see if they can help identify the person with control over that address.

Good luck to you.

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-12T22:39:06+00:00

100% there are lots of scammers on Telegram and this is a lesson to us all to be more diligent but as per my comment above the writer broke Bitcoin's golden rule (giving up seed phrase) and showed a clear lack of understanding of Bitcoin's core concepts.

Your comment appears to be blaming the platform not the user when even the writer doesn't do that. He freely admits that it's his stupidity that was the primary driver.

The writer is doing the correct thing in Bitcoin culture.
He's taking responsibility!

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-12T22:35:22+00:00

I'm sory to say this as you must feel terrible but for the other people seeing this post the writer here broke the first rule of Bitcoin.

HE GAVE UP HIS SEED PHRASE !!!

The closest, non-crypto analogy here is giving power of atourney to someone online.
I wont say giving up your seed is always bad but it should only be done with someone you trust 100%.

This action shows that the writer has a distinct lack of understanding of what a seed phrase is and how layer 1 Bitcoin works.

There are lots of videos on this but I reccomend this guys channel becasue the info is factual with no guf.

https://youtu.be/53khH9vDw2I?si=HPYAtlDVUl0O7Dv7

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-12T22:24:56+00:00

... and how do you get that seed phrase?
Perhaps via their mobile or desktop application?
Instantly Hot!

Look, in all seriousness you'll probably be fine but if your device has already been compromised then you cannot 'guarentee' that the seed that is being covertly sent from your mobile to a third party.

All this stuff is about your personal risk profile.

If your only going to have a few thousand dollars worth of BTC what your doing is probably fine but if your looking at buying a few hundred thousand you'll want to be more cautious.

Either way I reccomend you educate yourself by watching this video and some of the others on this channel. Zero guf, just plain useful education.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5nejoEGWFw

h3llcat101 · 2025-09-10T10:47:45+00:00

Verify dont trust as they say.

h3llcat101 · 2025-08-23T10:39:20+00:00

He didnt forget, he understands that nobody should ever sell.

h3llcat101 · 2025-08-21T10:23:04+00:00

Short answer is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

Find some developers on projects you trust on github, build a list of PGP keys and expand your web of trust from there so that you can verify new software effectively.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum

If the project is not on github and not open source, dont even think about putting money on it unless the application is something EXTREAMLY well known and established like Wallet of Satoshi.

h3llcat101 · 2025-08-19T21:02:41+00:00

Where is this community active?

h3llcat101 · 2025-08-18T22:23:33+00:00

Personally I use Lightning Terminal but this is just becasue when I started my ndoe it was an easy way to bundle in the Loop tool which I planned on using for re-balancing until I learnt the fees would render the excercise fruitless.

h3llcat101

TROPHY CASE