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We published a [new guide](https://raspibolt.org/static-channel-backup.html) for LND node operators that explains how to create a simple automatic backup of the SCB: * locally, on a USB stick or mSD card * remotely, to a private GitHub repo For added redundancy, the Telegram BOS bot also send SCB updates, see our set up [guide](https://raspibolt.org/bonus/lightning/balance-of-satoshis.html#optional-connect-your-node-to-a-telegram-bot) here. *(should work on any node with a Debian-based OS)*
Several banks and financial institutions including Bank of Switzerland (BOS), JPMorgan Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, Silvergate, EQIbank and lot more joined the adoption race last year with more to come this year 2022.
There's no doubt on that as first it was only Bank of AMERICA (BOA), JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of Switzerland (BOS), EQIbank and Wells Fargo and now we're moving from units to tens to hundreds of banks providing crypto-based services.
Is anyone working on a channel balancing app that "auto-adjusts" fees based on channel activity and market conditions? I have an umbrel and my attempts to ssh - BOS install but it has failed for reasons I don't understand.
Oh I think halifax, lloyds and BOS and all part of the same organisation
Good morning. Here is the Daily Dose of Crypto • Bitcoin dominance: 41.45% (-2.10%) • Cryptocurrency market cap: 1.979 Trillion Dollars (+9.49%) • BTC average transaction fee: $2.16 ( -15.78%) • ETH average gas Price: 73.92 Gwei (-30.59%) • Major cryptocurrencies with new ATH • Avalanche: AVAX ($75.83) • The crypto market staged a roaring comeback after Evergrande makes a deal to pay its debts and the Fed signals a continuation of its current monetary policy. • The Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan is partnering with Ripple to pilot a central bank digital currency in the mountainous kingdom. • Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch now supports Ethereum's scaling solution Arbitrum. As an optimistic rollup, Arbitrum allows to lower transaction fees and speed up confirmations. • The U.S. President is reportedly moving forward with the nomination of a crypto critic to run a federal bank regulator. The Biden administration intends to nominate Cornell University Professor Saule Omarova to be the next Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). • Major crypto options exchanges, including industry leader Deribit, are due to settle billions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin options contracts on Friday. • The New Jersey Bureau of Securities (NJ BOS) has once again postponed the date by when it will enforce a ban on the creation of BlockFi Interest Accounts (BIAs), BlockFi announced on Twitter on Wednesday. • Solana ecosystem project Orca has concluded an $18 million Series A investment round led by some of the biggest venture funds in crypto, offering further evidence that high-profile investors are keen to back SOL-based startups. • The Federal Reserve’s report on central bank digital currencies (CBDC), stablecoins and cryptocurrencies is coming “soon,” according to the central bank’s chair, Jerome Powell. • Dapper Labs has closed a $250 million funding round (with $7.6Billion valuation), the company behind NBA Top Shot and the Flow blockchain said Wednesday. • Singapore-based crypto custodian Cobo Wallet raised $40 million in a Series B round led by DST Global, A&T Capital and IMO Ventures. The funds will be used for Cobo’s so-called “DeFi as a Service (DaaS)” product. • Bitcoin.org appears to have fallen victim to a giveaway scam. Visitors to the site are greeted with a pop-up message inviting them to send money to a bitcoin wallet. The funds will be doubled and sent back. The message claims it is because the Bitcoin Foundation is “giving back to the community.” • Trading app Robinhood has opened up a waitlist to test a crypto wallet for users to hold their tokens.
Nice write-up. Unfortunately this sub has 'glamorized' being a 'routing node' on LN, and while it's a good invention, in practice you're going to lose money. My estimate is \~10 -15% of your initial investment in re-balance/on-chain fees. BOS is OK, but it doesn't guarantee it will find a reasonable balancing path. As it is currently setup, the BIG nodes are making good money because most of them have a service(s) tied to their node which give them incoming liquidity. Stack your sats ye of little coin, and let the big boys do the heavy routing.
There are indeed some funny ones. You can browse the [BOS List](https://fulmo.org/bos-score.html) or [Terminal Web](https://terminal.lightning.engineering/) to see some of them.
I've seen this article posted a lot on r/btc, it's interesting but very flawed IMO, which is why i felt like typing this fucking essay. Now this article is almost 4 years old so the author obviously didn't know about things like atomic multi path payments or loop, but that's also the tldr: problems can be, and are getting solved. Hubs: What it doesn’t tell you is that this can only be accomplished by using large, centralized “banking” hubs. What the authors don't tell you is that anyone can be a "banking" hub. There are currently over 250 BOS certified nodes, and thousands more nodes that are routing nodes. Every little community or family could have their own node run by the famlies crypto nerd, managing channels, and since it is shared (using trustless software like bluewallets LNDhub), there would be plenty of capacity. Creating channels: It’s pointless to create a payment channel for the sole purpose of sending an off-chain transaction, since it requires an on-chain transaction to open the channel (and another one to close). You might as well just send an on-chain transaction instead; you don’t need the LN. Literially the exact opposite. The author assumes you would just close the channel immediatly which is stupid. It's pointless to just send an on chain tx when you could be opening a channel, since the fee is going to be basically the same (thanks taproot) and when the ln tx is through you now have some free inbound liquidity that you didn't have before! If the receiver wants the funds on-chain they can just loop it out. You might say that this doesn't apply to small transactions (because small channels are usually pretty useless for routing) but if you are a routing node you would already have sufficient liquidity to not have to open a new (small) channel, and if you are an end user you could open a private channel, since you're not interested in routing anyways. Also, microtransactions :) Allocation: Your Money Can’t Be In Two Places At the Same Time Atomic multi path payments solves this. The author could obviously not have know of the tech before it existed, but thats the thing with lightning, the problems get solved. ...what? Even if we make a (possibly generous) assumption that a user can route 20 times his normal transaction load and only suffer a reduction of 50% in the availability of his channels, then he would need double the number of channels he normally would have. I have no clue why he thinks that routing payments makes channels unavailable, its not like every month all users spend their average 1000$ all at once, I don't understand the argument at all. He later says: The second (disruption) is that the money used in routing others’ payments is unavailable to the user during the time that the route is in use. Yea for like a few seconds! An absolute nothingburger Planning: If we assume peers form mostly random connections without a central authority to plan routes \[...\] Decentralization does not mean there cannot be coordination: LN+ is a perfect example to disprove this. If routing nodes create a giant mesh of well connected nodes (reddit megahub anyone?) end users and non-routing nodes can connect to any routing node part of the mesh, no need to connect to random nodes or the biggest of hubs. Chance: Even the basic math we started with: 10⁶=1,000,000 isn’t quite applicable. If we assume peers form mostly random connections without a central authority to plan routes, then there’s a certain probability of success. A one-in-a-million chance, repeated a million times, only produces a 63% success rate. Choosing 2 million times improves this to 84%, which would mean increasing the number of channels.³ Once again i have no clue what he's on about. One-in-a-million chance? Routing isn't chance. A LN node has the entire channel graph, a node doesn't just guess it way through the network. Either I'm misinterpreting his point or the is a lot of incompetence on the authors part. Also the probability calculations later on seem to be pulling numbers and equations from where the sun don't shine, possibly to convince anyone who doesn't read it through properly, but lets not throw around accusations. The way the author talks about probability makes it sound like he took one statistics class and thinks just throwing numbers into equations has anything to do with LN. Again, nodes HAVE the channel graph and can find the best rout , not to mention a route. Just read the clarification post and the probabilities are about whether a route exists or not. This is still silly since there are so many routing nodes that want to connect everyone with anyone. There is incentive for routing nodes to connect poorly connected nodes, and since end-users dont open channels randomly but usually with well connected routing nodes this becomes a non-issue. Liquidity: As users spend their income, available routes degrade, until the time that more funds are deposited. In other words, when a person receives a salary payment and deposits funds in the network, their channels are at a maximum, with full routing power. But as their money is spent, this power drops toward zero. Averaged out, this pattern cuts the routing power by about half, requiring double the number of channels. Just like the previous point this demonstrates a lack of understanding. Spent liquidity isn't gone, it's just moved to a different part of the network (and can be regained with circular rebalances). In a complete "LN ecosystem" where both users and companies pay and get paid with LN a circular rebalance would make it so you'd never have to open new channels basically. Node cousins: To simplify the calculations, we will ignore the possibility that a branch on the tree could link to another branch already on the tree (such as an ancestor or cousin). Yup, thats a pretty big assumption, and far from reality. LN is NOT a tree, far from it. And because it's not, we can use atomic multi path payments. Money constraints: However, we can make a very general common-sense assumption that many or most users will receive some kind of income at some kind of regular interval, and deposit an allowance of funds into the LN for spending. Maybe so, then again, maybe not. LN was from the very beginning meant primarily for micro-transactions, since on-chain fees are a larger relative cost for smaller transactions. Any company that would pay salaries could obviously batch those transactions on-chain, and the total fees, let's say a few bucks? would be negligible. Salaries also don't have to be instant, a delay of an hour not to mention 10 minutes wouldn't make a difference to anyone. This obviously doesn't mean salaries wouldn't work on LN: the company could simply have large channels to grocery stores for example, and circular rebalance before paying salaries using AMP, pulling a little bit from each of the workers channels, like channels to said grocery stores, and after the rebalance just pay the salary with the same channel. Or similarily use the Admin/user model with Bluewallet/LNDhub mentioned earlier. I use lightning literially daily, and i believe it works perfectly for small, frequent transactions and as a means to offload said microtransactions from the blockchain. Not every transaction needs to be on the blockchain. credit to u/schulze1
I think we have started a WTFC season where if we hold our BOS trend upper all values then Moon is next home. WTFC = Who the fark cares BOS = Balls of steel
Just take off your America-only goggles, pal. Aside from a few areas like SFO / NYC / BOS real estate in the US is dirt cheap... Probably partly because your stock market is actually doing well. Our stock index is still pre-financial crisis levels. People buy real estate because they are literally out of options.
Does being too scared to do anything quantify as BOS?
I’m going all in on this “Balls of Steel coin” (BOS) of which you speak & HODLing to the moon!
You can get by with a small number of channels (even one!), but they have to be with well-connected nodes having very good uptime. Consult the node ranking engines like [Terminal Web](https://terminal.lightning.engineering/) and the [BOS Score](https://fulmo.org/bos-score.html) and pick something in the top 50 or so, and you should be good to go.
Thanks, yep BOS to SLC for a national parks adventure. It will be nice to get away from the charts for a week!
>If you have a channel with a peer, but it isn't well managed, and in \_practice+ isn't useful for routing, then it won't show up as "good" in the system. Check out some of the related guides for tips on how to better manage your set of channels. Well well, I agree but the reality is different. You removed node like ACINQ, so are they counted as good peer ? I bet no but this is disturbing. Looking at the rating, almost all nodes after the 394th are considered "Unstable", even [rompert.com](https://rompert.com) (or Zap node) which is clearly one of the biggest. Are "unstable" node considered good peer ? I bet no but I would say that so much objectively good nodes rejected at the bottom of the ranking is misleading. This means your set of good peers is arbitrarly restricted because of criteria which are related to the availability of channels, channels that may be unavailable from times to times not because of the nodes that you hold responsible since your are ranking them low but because of other small nodes which open channels and may be offline sometimes. ​ >If you want to be a good router, then it's better to ensure your set of channels is stable and useful. If you have a bunch of idle channels that are offline most of the time (ignoring unadvertised channels of mobile nodes, etc), Yes, but you have no reliable way to measure "stability" and "usefullness" of a channel. Yes if a channel is always disable I can say it is not stable and not useful. But an always available channel is not necessarly useful and a usefull channel is not necessarely always available. One thing is sure: "no channel" is the worth case, neither useful nor stable. And this list incentivizes "no channel" instead of "useful even if not always available". ​ > then those funds are likely better allocated to areas of the graph that have demand for that liquidity. I disagree. I can have no funds in those channels, but the counter party peer does have it all because he opens the channel and doesn't show up often. I still have no reason to close the channel (HE does if HE cares, not me). Also, sometimes there are peers which appear offline because there are connection issues but this is only temporary and the network still use the channel often (so better having it than not). >\[Pool is a useful tool to help your node\](https://lightning.engineering/pool/) allocate your idle capital to where it's most demanded. Well yes I used it (for both buy and sell, I am T1 ranked). But for example, some node from which I bought the inbound liquidity have higher fees then other so they will always be used last (so in fact never when you are a routing node, or against very highfees to circular rebalance). Also, Pool may open several channel with the same nodes. And those nodes can be offline quite often while you have no liquidity in them because of connectivity issue or whatever (gods of LN connectvity not with us). So allocating capital where a node demand it the most is not always where it the better allocated. I understand it is hard to make a fair ranking of nodes, it depends of what we try to evaluate and we have only very partial information. I would be happy to use such ranking if criteria were explicitly given so that we know the limit of it. But like BOS list, it is closed source. I would still have no problem with that, just not using it that much if I don't understand how it ranks nodes. But I am sad that you end up using such ranking as economic labelling in some crucial market like Pool....
If you're going for routing fees, bigger. 500k is a reasonable minimum, personally I do 1M. Reasons for big channels on a routing node: 1. Economics. Channel opens and closes are mostly fixed costs, whereas the speed at which you can make those sats back depends on how much liquidity is in the channel. 2. Traffic. Right now most payments are still single-path, so if you're one the few channels than fit a big payment, you can charge high fees for it. 3. Ratings. In the long run, you're likely hoping to get a BOS score. The BOS score likes big, old channels to well-connected nodes.
You can already open many channels with a single TX, but it's not integreated into the wallets yet. BOS offers it as a 3rd party tool. I believe the upcoming taproot soft fork will enable channel factories, but I don't know the details.
Very happy ot get my hands dirty with the Raspibolt project! [https://stadicus.github.io/RaspiBolt/](https://stadicus.github.io/RaspiBolt/) Here is my LN node URI: 037c843b400979eaab5c679fc55c75b75c832ff61946d9aaaa2e34797dd4c3a883@4tclu34es5bqqr2juydgsudkyieh66el7g4ap5r7qji47klqrzpatlid.onion:9735 If any well connected BOS-ranked node would like to connect to me with a bit of liquidity, that'd be very much appreciated! (when fees are less prohibitive maybe..) I intend to increase channel counts and capacity in the coming weeks and months as I'm learning more about channel management and the LN. Lightining is great, try it using Phoenix or Breez on mobile and send and receive sats for almost no fees, here are a few links to start with: * [https://phoenix.acinq.co/](https://phoenix.acinq.co/) * [https://breez.technology/](https://breez.technology/) * [https://www.bitrefill.com/](https://www.bitrefill.com/) * [https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html](https://www.lopp.net/lightning-information.html)
Yes. I've used Balance of Satoshis (BOS) to open 6 channels all within one transaction to 6 different nodes before.