Merchant¶
Aimed for receiving payments, focuses on inbound liqudity
Capital requirement¶
- minimal to buy incoming channels
- temporarily high to create incoming capacity from channels opened
Channels and peers¶
- few (2-3) channels with well connected and capitalized nodes
- connect to nodes on the Bos list
- see existing fee settings on Amboss / 1ml.com
- Check node stability on Lightning Web
Liquidity¶
- mostly remote
Uptime¶
- high, but not perfect
- unavailability affects sales
Management¶
- Loop out (Autoloop) to empty existing channels
- Close and Reopen when channels are filled up
- a channel open (and close) is not more expensive than using Loop given :
- have onchain liquidity for more channels (or splice in in the future) or
- can afford the channel downtime between peers to close and reopen
- Buy further inbound liquidity
- Use liquidity ads to buy inbound
- Try Amboss Magma
- Place bids on Lightning Pool
- Advertise to receive inbound
- Sweeping funds
- On-chain or off-chain sweeps may be necessary if Lightning wallet balance becomes too large
- An off-chain sweep can improve your privacy as well as give you inbound liquidity
Examples¶
- Self hosted node connected to a local or remote BTCPayServer
- BTCPayServer on a VPS (acceptable with low amount of funds)
- Fully hosted solutions (trusted) - eg. Voltage
- Coming: Greenlight from Blockstream
Special cases¶
- Accepting donations
- Offer to pay onchain for high value payments (miner fee < 0.5-1%)
- can progress to a Routing node as the number of connections and capital grows