After reading this far, you've probably set up a Lightning wallet. In this chapter we will take things one step further and set up a full Lightning node, learning how to operate and maintain it over time.
There are many reasons why you might want to set up your own Lightning node:
* To be a full participant of the Lightning Network, not just an end-user.
* To run an e-commerce store, or earn income with Lightning payments.
* To develop new services, applications or plugins on the Lightning Network
* To increase your privacy while using Lightning
Of course, there are costs to running a Lightning Network node. You need a computer (of course), a permanent Internet connection, lots of disk space, and lots of time!
But the skills you will learn from this experience are valuable and can be applied to a variety of other tasks too.
There are many ways you can run a Lightning node, from a small mini-PC hosted in your home, to a dedicated server, to a hosted server in the cloud. The method you choose will depend on the resources you have and how much money you want to spend.
==== Why is reliability important for running a Lightning Node?
In Bitcoin, unless one is specifically running a mining node, hardware is not particularly important.
The Bitcoin Core node software can be run on any machine that meets its minimum requirements and does not need to be online to receive payments; only to send them.
If a Bitcoin node goes down for an extended period of time, the user can simply reboot the node and once it connects to the rest of the network, it will resync the blockchain.
In Lightning however, the user needs to be online both to send _and_ to receive payments. If the Lightning user is offline it cannot receive any payments from anyone and thus its open invoices cannot be fulfilled.
Furthermore, the open channels of an offline node cannot be used to route payments. Your channel partners will notice that you are offline and cannot contact you to route a payment. If you are offline too often, they may consider the Bitcoin locked up in their channels with you to be "wasted" capacity, and may close those channels. We also consider the case of a Protocol Breach i.e. your channel partner tries to cheat you by submitting an earlier commitment transaction. If you are offline and your channels aren't being monitored, then the theft could succeed and you will have no recourse once the timelock expires.
Hence, node reliability is extremely important for a Lightning node.
There is also the issue of hardware failure and loss of data. In Bitcoin, hardware failure can be a trivial problem if the user has a backup of their mnemonic phrase or private key. The Bitcoin wallet and the bitcoin inside the wallet be easily restored from the private key on any computer or hardware wallet, and the blockchain can be re-downloaded from any peer.
In Lightning however, the information about the user's channels, including the commitment transactions and revocation secrets, are not publicly known and are only stored on the individual user's hardware.
Thus, hardware failure in the Lightning Network can easily result in loss of funds.
==== What are the types of hardware Lightning Nodes?
* **General Purpose Computers**: a Lightning Network node can be run on a home computer or laptop running Windows, MacOS, or Linux. Typically this is run alongside a Bitcoin node.
* **Dedicated Hardware**: a Lightning Node can also be run on dedicated hardware like a Raspberry Pi, Rock64, or mini-PC. This setup would usually run a software stack including a Bitcoin node and other applications. This setup is popular as the hardware is dedicated to running and maintaining the Lightning node only and is usually set up with an installation "helper".
* **Specialized Hardware**: a Lightning Network node can also be run on purpose-built hardware specifically designed for it. This would include "out-of-the-box" Lightning node solutions that can be purchased as a kit or turn-key system.
Virtual Private Server (VPS) and "cloud computing" services such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) are quite affordable and can be set up very quickly. A Lightning node can be hosted for between $20 and $40 per month on such a service.
However, as the saying goes, "'Cloud' is just other people's computers". Using these services means running your node on other people's computers, with all the privacy and security implications that has. A Lightning node running in the "cloud", will always be less secure, less private that one running on your own computer. Additionally, these cloud computing services are very centralized. The vast majority of Bitcoin and Lightning nodes running on such services are located in a handful of data centers in Virginia, Sunnyvale, Seattle, London and Frankfurt. When the networks or data centers of these providers have service problems, it affects thousands of nodes on so-called "decentralized" networks.
Running a Lightning node in the cloud is better than not running a node at all, and worse than running it on your own computer at home or in your office.
If you have a reasonable capacity internet link at home, or in your office, you can certainly run a Lightning node there. Any "broadband" connection is sufficient for this purpose (running a lightweight node), and a fast connection will allow you to run a Bitcoin full node too.
While you can run a Lightning node (and even a Bitcoin node) on your laptop, it will become annoying quite fast. These programs consume your computer's resources and need to run 24/7, and you will find yourself competing against the background services for your computer's attention (meaning your browser and other desktop workloads will be slowed down).
Instead, most users will choose to run a node on a dedicated computer. Fortunately, you don't need a "server" class computer to do this. You can run a Lightning node on a mini-PC, such as a Raspberry Pi or an Atom-based fanless PC, computers which are commonly used as a media server or home automation hub. These are relatively inexpensive, costing between $50 and $150 USD at that time of this writing. To run on a mini-PC, you will need an external USB hard drive, which again is relatively inexpensive, costing approximately $50 USD. The advantage of a dedicated mini-PC as a platform for Lightning and Bitcoin nodes is that it can run continuously, silently and unobtrusively on your home WiFi network, tucked behind your router or TV. No one will even know that this little box is actually a global banking system!
==== What hardware is required to run a Lightning node?
At a minimum, the following will be required to run a Lightning Node:
* **CPU**: sufficient processing power will be required to run a Bitcoin node, which will continuously download and validate new blocks. The user also needs to consider the Initial Block Download (IBD) when setting up a new Bitcoin node which can take anywhere from several hours to several days. A 2-core or 4-core CPU is recommended.
* **RAM**: a system running both Bitcoin and Lightning nodes may work on 2GB RAM _barely_, but will perform much better with at least 4GB of RAM. The Initial Block Download will be especially challenging with less than 4GB of RAM. More than 8GB of RAM is unnecessary, because the CPU is the greater bottleneck for these types of services, due to cryptographic operations such as signature validation.
* **Storage Drive**: this can be a Hard Drive or an SSD, although an SSD will be significantly quicker for running a Bitcoin node. Most of the storage is used for the Bitcoin blockchain, which can take up more than 300GB (as of June 2020).
* **Internet Connection**: a reliable internet connection will be required to download new Bitcoin blocks, as well as to communicate with other Lightning Peers. Estimated data use ranges from 10GB to 100GB per month, depending on configuration.
* **Power Supply**: a reliable power supply is required as Lightning nodes need to be online at all times. A power failure will cause in-progress payments to fail. For heavy duty routing nodes, a backup or uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is useful in the case of power outages.
In addition, the user will also want to consider some kind of data backup solution. This could be a cloud-based automated backup to a server or web service the user controls. Or, it could be a local hardware backup, such as a second drive. Or for best results, a combination of local and remote backup.
==== Switching server configuration in the cloud
When renting a cloud server, it is often cost effective to change the configuration between two phases of operation: A faster CPU and faster storage will be needed during the Initial Block Download (e.g. the first day). After the blockchain has synced, the CPU and storage speed requirements are much less, so the performance can be downgraded to a more cost-effective level.
For example, on Amazon's cloud, we would use a 8-16GB RAM, 8-core CPU (e.g. t3-large or m3.large) and faster 400GB SSD (1000+ provisioned IOPS) for the Initial Block Download (IBD), reducing its time to just 6-8 hours. Once that is complete, we would switch the server instance to a 2GB RAM, 2-core CPU (e.g. t3.small) and storage to a general purpose 1TB HDD. This will cost about the same as if you ran it on the slower sevrer the entire time, but will get you up and running in less than a day instead of having to wait almost a week for the IBD.
===== Permanent data storage (drive)
If you use a mini-PC or rent a server, the storage can be the costliest part, costing as much as the computer and connectivity (data) added together.
Let's have a look at the different options available. First there are two main types of drives, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). HDDs are a lot cheaper and SSDs are a lot faster, but both would do the job.
The fastest SSDs up to date use the NVMe interface, but depending on your hardware they may not be better than the cheaper version, SATA SSDs. As an example, the Raspberry Pi 4 cannot benefit from them because of the limited bandwidth of its USB port.
To choose the size, let's look at the Bitcoin blockchain. As of July 2020 its size is approximately 330GB including the transaction index. If you want to have some margin available for the future or to install other stuff on your node, purchase at least a 512GB drive or better yet a 1TB drive.
Installing a Lightning node (or also a Bitcoin node), may be daunting if you are not familiar with a command-line environment. However, there are a number of projects that make "helpers", software that installs and configures the various components for you. You will still need to learn some command-line incantations to interact with your node, but most of the initial work is done for you.
One of the most popular and complete such "helpers", is _RaspibBlitz_, a project built by Christian Rootzoll, which is intended to be installed on a Raspberry Pi 4. RaspiBlitz comes with a recommended hardware "kit" that you can build in a matter of hours, or at most a weekend. If you attent a Lightning "hackathon" in your city, you are likely to see many people working on their RaspiBlitz set up, swapping tips and helping each other. You can find the RaspiBlitz project here:
MyNode is another popular open source project including a lot of Bitcoin related software. Is is easy to install: you "flash" the installer onto an SD card, and boot your mini-PC from the SD card. You do not need any screen to use myNode as the administrative tools are accessible from a browser. You can manage it from a computer or even from your smartphone. Once installed, go to http://mynode.local/ and create a lightning wallet and node in two clicks.
Maintaining a Lightning node using the command-line can be a tedious task sometimes, fortunately we can use Ride The Lightning, most commonly known as RTL.
RTL is web graphical user interface to help users to manage lightning node operations for the three main lightning implementations (LND, c-lightning and Eclair), RTL is an open source project developed by Suheb, Shahana Farooqi and many other contributors. You can find the RTL software here:
