I followed the guides to install LND and RTL, opened a private channel to Start9 HQ and funded it. I noticed that most of the times, receiving sats failed due to inability to find routes - I have plenty of inbound liquidity. A few questions that I’d love to hear from others about what they’re doing and their best practices:
What’s the “sweet spot” in terms of # of channels open?
How to find a good candidate to open a channel with using Amboss or other site?
Start9 docs say to keep channel private, which seems to affect routing. What are the downsides of having a public channel?
Unfortunately these numbers are all very very subjective.
But first… when you open a private channel, your channel is… well… private. This means to most peers on the Lightning network they’ll have a hard time finding you and your channel since you don’t exist to anyone by Start9 HQ. The way around this is to tell each node how to find you (making you non-private to that payer) but choosing a setting called “include routing hints”. With this enabled, you may have an easier time receiving payments.
What’s the “sweet spot” in terms of # of channels open?
Hard to say, the ideal number is less important that having an incredible diverse set of channels. So you’ve opened to Start9HQ… you’d now look at nodes that have none of the same peers, and, should you have time to work it all out, nodes that have non of the same peers AND their peers have none of the same peers. This means you’ll always have routes to fall back on.
How to find a good candidate to open a channel with using Amboss or other site?
Hard to say, other than to find peers using the guidance I provided above. There do exist tools out there where you provide your node ID and they’ll work out the best peers to open channels with… but you’d need to have a bunch of channels before that can provide useful information.
Start9 docs say to keep channel private, which seems to affect routing. What are the downsides of having a public channel?
You can’t route with private channels. Public channels can route, as they announce all the peers they have channels with, allowing other peers to discover routes. The downsides of this is that everyone knows who your peers are and can take a good guess as to what your balance might be. If you’ve doxed ownership of your node, this means “people” can also know how much bitcoin you have.