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