Hello all,
Phew it's been a while since I've posting anything. Let's rectify that now..
I've gone and done it, finally I have my own Bitcoin Lightning node. I first mentioned my experiments with Lighting Network about 7 months ago in this post:
@neoxian/my-first-adventures-with-lightning-network
In that post I said
The non-custodial options look like they require a bit more work, I will investigate them, and hopefully describe one in a future post.
Well here we are. Did it require a bit more work? Yes it sure did!
First a quick refresher. The Bitcoin Lighting network is a second layer network that runs on top of base Bitcoin. It can allow for quick and very cheap transactions. The transactions take place in something called a "channel" which is opened on the base layer, and then closed later after many transactions have taken place in it.
Ok well, it was "easy" in the sense that a single individual using a very modest and cheap computer can run a lightning node. You should have a pretty good network though. You do not have to be a large company, with a huge server room and a million dollar budget to run a node like this. This is important for the decentralization, that lots of small individuals can run their nodes if they want.
Here is a picture of my lightning node. Cute huh? Just a little tiny computer I have sitting in my office. Heck I also run a Nextcloud server on it as well, and will probably add some other servers on it too, so it's not even 100% dedicated to the lightning node.
Your average grandma or Joe will probably have trouble setting up their own lightning node. To be fair, I didn't do it the easiest way possible. There are turn-key solutions that you can just buy and plug in and turn on, and they just work. Here are a couple:
https://umbrel.com/ or
https://start9.com/
Both of these offer an option to simply buy a small box with everything set up on it already. I wanted a little more control, so I did it the harder way and set it up myself.
You can peek at my node via https://1ml.com/, a cool site that very handy when looking at lightning nodes.
My own node is here:
https://1ml.com/node/02c9ba7fd7494bcd3a707e3171ea7a7311a373a1695c94c33e7c76bde7aef3a88d
Called "Thorheim", I've opened up 3 channels so far. With a capacity of 0.0223 BTC. I still have some work to do. Would like to open a few more channels and balance the liquidity on both sides. With any luck maybe I can start collecting fees
If there is someone else out there with a Lightning node, it would be awesome if you could open a channel to me. If you did that and posted about it, could upvote you and cover your fees.
I know 
Anyway, it's interesting, and the system will only improve over time. Hopefully there will be ways to make things even easier for average folk. Also there is still things like https://getalby.com/ that is very easy to use if you don't mind something custodial
