A challenge many node-runners are facing today is reliability on one anonymous connection point to the lightning network: Tor
It's serving us all well, allowing mostly trustless and hidden connection point, to the payment infrastructure of the future, with little to no costs.
But Lightning payment routing requires more than tat: our needs are about privacy, that's our DNA, but for successful routing, reliability, connectivity and speed come into play. Relying your node connectivity to a single service Tor is a risk, as anyone running a lightning node can testify. For fast communication establishing clearnet connections between nodes is inevitable.
The effort of creating a valuable “clearnet over VPN” node is quite high and intense because it touches several disciplinaries not every node runner is comfortable with. You could go hybrid, we've shared guides to get there in previous posts, but announcing your home IP publicly hampers security and anonymity.
Therefore we came to the conclusion that this process has to be simplified a lot. In the last few weeks we put together all the pieces that we think provide the best of both worlds to make it as easy as possible to go hybrid.
Hybrid connectivity means you're connected via Tor and Clearnet at the same time, allowing more reliability and speed.
Hence, we're launching the Beta of Tunnel ⚡ Sats
With this solution, we want to address the growing pain-points running your Lightning Node with Tor only, or exposing your home IP.
What does that look like?
Visit http://tunnelsats.com or http://tunnelpasz3fpxhuw6obb5tpuqkxmcmvqh7asx5vkqfwe7ix74ry22ad.onion today & read through the 3 part activation routine:
- sign up for a tunnel-server we run for you
- download the open-sourced script installing the tunnel
- do your own changes in your LND / CLN config
We expect that in ~ 5-10 minutes, you're done and gone hybrid. You will see better connectivity, faster response times and hence more routing, but with no compromises on privacy and security!
Have more questions? Check out the FAQ or join our Telegram channel.
Convinced already?
The workflow is tested with umbrel, mynodebtc and RaspiBlitz, and works on bare-metal raspibolt too.
We have 10+ Alpha customers and our own test-nodes with vivid testing processes.
Join the test-phase with a significant discount for $1 / month today if you like to go hybrid.
Since this is a forum, we're very curious to hear your thoughts and concerns. What's clear, what's uncertain? Where do we need to double-down on? Let us know, we're super happy to hear all your feedback.
Thanks and happy routing