Why someone closed his 8btc and 300 channels LN node.

This is testimony from another former noderunner (with 300 channels) who closed their LN node for the same reasons that I've been talking about for a long time.

Without constant, continuous, and professional dedication and work, you cannot cover the costs and risks of losing your bitcoins. There is no such thing as 'passive' income.

I am new to Stacker, but I am an old gangster who has been in Bitcoin since 2011, and have experienced all the ups and downs of Bitcoin.Since around 2018, I have been running a Lightning node that has become quite popular, with up to 8 BTC of liquidity and around 300 channels. At first it was on LND, but then I switched to CLIGHTNING due to all the bugs that LND had and which caused me to lose some money. Not only that, my node is running entirely on a mobile 4G connection, as I am always moving and don't want my node in a data center because I'm paranoid about controlling my machines, especially with Bitcoin, the great treasure.Since then, the number of channels in my node has decreased from 300 to 150 to 100, then 50, and so on, as well as the liquidity, down to 2 BTC. The reason for this is mainly something I didn't suspect before starting this adventure, and it is that maintaining a Lightning node requires a lot of work. For this reason, three years ago, I gave up working on the node, installed CLBOSS (an automatic node maintenance software), and to be honest, it has worked quite well and done a better job than me.However, even with CLBOSS, I have suffered many problems that have also caused me to lose money. The worst of these problems was that the SSD where my node resided got damaged, causing corruption in the CLIGHTNING database and forcing the closure of half of my channels, losing a significant amount in miner fees.Despite all this, I tried to update CLIGHTNING and another new bug prevented me from doing so, and that was the last straw. So much effort, for what? With all the routing, I barely earned 400ksats, which doesn't even cover maintenance costs, let alone my time. So I made a list of reasons why a normal person, or "plebeian," might not be interested in maintaining a Bitcoin node, and there are many:

• Too much work and time spent maintaining the node.
• Meager earnings.
• High technical knowledge requirements if you really want to have more than 5 or 10 channels and resolve technical issues that will undoubtedly arise in the years to come.
• Limited mobile options (forces you to set up a reverse proxy with a VPS in some datacenter if you want to use clearnet).
• Excessive risk, money is at stake and hardware can fail, or a bug in the software could arise.
• Limited automation options (the only one that works well is CLBOSS and it's only available for CLIGHTNING).
• Periodic headaches.

For all these reasons, I have decided that maintaining a Lightning node, despite having had it for years, is not worth it, no matter how much enthusiasm I have or how much I like Bitcoin and Lightning. I join the long list of plebeyans who shut down their node.From now on, I will only use the options available for normal users. In particular, Electrum for desktop and Phoenix, Breez, Zeus for mobile, because they are more than sufficient for me. I live off Bitcoin and need immediate liquidity to use P2P exchanges like Robosats or coupon sites like Bitrefill, or simply pay with Lightning to small businesses and friends. And for that, I don't need a node. That is the reality.I think Lightning nodes are for entities that handle large daily liquidity and justify investing resources in technical knowledge and time on them, such as stores, social networks, wallets, exchanges, etc. For everyone else, it's better to use the countless options that Lightning offers for desktop and mobile.

Original post: stacker.news/items/486283

Read the thread and draw your own conclusions.