Hello community!
Seeking advice from experienced routers as I launched my Lightning routing node (LND on Raspberry Pi 4 /Umbrel) a few weeks ago and I find myself facing the classic problem of channel imbalance. Liquidity always goes in the same direction and I find myself with almost empty channels on the outgoing or incoming side.
My current config:
• \~3.5M sats distributed over 6 channels (ACINQ 500k, Kraken 1M, LNBiG 500k, BavarianBitcoinBank 500k, Megalith LSP 1M)
• Fee management via Lightning Terminal Autopilot
• Manual rebalancing via Loop Out/In (Boltz)What I tried:
• Loop Out on Kraken to rebalance (it works but it's case by case)
• Fees adjustment (Autopilot had set fees to 0-10 ppm... I went back to 200-500 ppm)My questions:
- How do you manage structural imbalance when traffic only goes one way?
- What fee strategy do you adopt to encourage the return flow?
- What do you use for automatic rebalancing? charge-lnd? rebalance-lnd?
- Any peers to recommend for a beginner node looking to be well connected?
Any feedback is welcome, thanks in advance 🙏
Thanks for the routing fees.
Depletion is inevitable due to LNs fee mechanism.
The most important advice I will tell you something that nobody dare to say it: asking how to manage properly your LN node is like a bank asking his competitors how to outsmart them...
In other words NOBODY will tell you exactly what to do because will be against their own strategy. The LN fees market is a ferocious jungle. You must find your own way if you want to be a reliable routing node.
That is the 1st weak point. That system is a total garbage for a reliable public routing node.
Read here about this aspect:
2nd weak point. Those 3.5M sats is just peanuts. If you really want to be a good router, you MUST have much much larger liquidity.
Read here:
That depends what is your focus... you have to choose wisely your peers. I've explained in my guides more scenarios.
And the last point I want to mention is this: it all depends where do you position yourself.
If you want to learn how to manage properly, you will have to do a lot of tests and strategies (pay attention to my guides) and put a lot of liquidity in the game.
Thank you for the answer, all these links are really useful and i'll take time to read and apply the suggestions I'm seeing in it. It will take time, but hey, there's no rush either!
At the moment I can only make small channels, and another question I've is:
How does peers and channel opening selection work?
What's the criteria and is there any tool that I can use to help me find good peers?
read the guides and you will find out...
I think you mean nobody who knows what they’re doing, because I’m perfectly happy to share my dumb experience.
Have you tried different approaches to setting your fees or is it just one automated algorithm?
Yes for now is set with automated fee management via Lightning Terminal Autopilot, I know is not ideal. I'm focusing on learning more before switching to manual fee management using other software.
I don’t know much about how they set fees but it seems likely that yours are miscalibrated for your place in the network.
Choose channels that bring routing in both directions. Channels that bring no routing are useless, (if your goal is a routing node) and channels that bring a lot of traffic in only one direction will require rebalancing, which has a cost
Update channel fees to favor both directon on all channels :
Update fee policy to not have max htlc size greater than your channel capacity. It might leak a bit of info about your channel balance, but will avoid useless attempts for other nodes, so you will get less blacklisted as a node that always fails attempts
Update this on your channel quite often, but not too often, to not be considered a spaming node and get banned. Say, at most a single update of all channel policies per day, and up to 3 individual updates for a few selected channels if really needed?
Personally, i do this by a python script that is run regularly through lncli. to update channel policies
And i have my ugly free channel advisor at lnshortcut.xyz to suggest me nodes to connect to (i am in the progress of publishing sources, coming shortly)
One thing i know i am not good at is being greedy. My channel fee rule is basically '1ppm pr 1M of channel capacity'. So even my biggest 16m channel, when fee rules mentionned above allow, is only at 16 sats per million sat routed..
But hey, at least i earn slightly more than occasional channel close fees and have no rebalancing costs
And obsiously yes, as @DarthCoin said, you probably have to low capacity for now to see anything substantially flow (for me, it was at about 0.7BTC of capacity?)