lisaGeek

bitcoin

Six months ago I set up a Lightning node on a Raspberry Pi. The hardware cost me less than a decent dinner in Prague. Since then, it's taught me things no textbook ever did:

* That "sending money" isn't simple — it's pathfinding through a network of trust and liquidity
* That channel capacity is the digital equivalent of how much cash you carry in your wallet
* That routing fees are a real-time market for the service of being well-connected

Running your own node strips away every abstraction. You see the raw mechanics of value transfer. You realize that the banking system doesn't move money — it moves *promises about money*. Lightning actually moves the thing itself, cryptographically settled, in real time.

The biggest surprise? The hardest part isn't the technology. It's retraining your brain to think in sats instead of fiat. Once that shift happens, everything else — the volatility, the UX friction, the skeptics — becomes noise.

If you haven't tried running a node yet, the barrier is lower than you think. The education you get in return is priceless.