Quote from: cAPSLOCK on May 09, 2020, 08:28:21 PM

So today I had a bit of a heart thumper...

I run nodes. Because I think it is important to run nodes. Do I think everyone should? No. Just like I think many of the thoughts of the crypto community (yes i said CRYPTO, JJG) are pie in the sky idealism with ideas like "being your own bank" or citadels. Lol.

It's not that you have to. It's that you CAN that is the revolution. You CAN be your own bank. You CAN run a bitcoin node.

Well i was cleaning up the studio a little today to make room for this thing which fedex delivers today:

And I happened to glance at one of my lightning nodes. It's running on a rPi and has a itty bitty screen that just lets mne know it's all good.

give root password for maintenance or press ctrl+d to continue

Oh, shit.

Quick log into 1ml.com and go look at my node. Last update? 7 days ago. Dang it!

How did I let that slip by so long???
What is the expiry on the HTLCs for this one? Did I happen to set them to a week?
What if the damn HDD is toast?
Did I remember to set up the channel backups?
If so did I do it properly?
Where is my seed for this one again?
What version of LND/bitcoind/rtl/etc am I running again?

So then I downloaded puppy linux, used rufus to set it up on some trash USB thumbdrive booted, plugged in the HDD, and tried to mount.

"Cannot mount. Structure needs cleaning."

Oh, thank God. This is probably just a borked filesystem from a power outage I didn't notice.

fsck -y /dev/hdd1

Repaired.

mkdir ~/ln
mount /dev/hdd1 ln
Filesystem mounted.

la -la

etc...

Whew...
mkdir /mnt/windowsdisk/ln
cp -fR ln/ /mnt/windowsdisk/ln/

Go get coffee...

It backed up... Shut it down properly, umount it, power up the rPi again...

Whew...

So, yeah. Nothing was ever all that wrong. There was no catastrophe. I was able to get it up and running easily, it was the absolute least bad thing that could even have happened.

But here's the thing. I know what I am doing. I mean where am I on the continuum from enough-to-be-dangerous------------the-guy-you-should-call? Probably pretty solidly on the left hand side over there. But that's just it. Running a lightning node is technically complex for most people, even one like this using an out of the box product (raspiblitz... can't say enough good about it. Solid and well done, although I have upgraded lnd and rtl manually... can't help it). My other LND note was built fully from scratch (well, not LFS, but Arch), and if it just had not been one of the first 200 nodes... EVER... I think I would take it down and replace it with another one of these. And you know, I just might take it down and be DONE with it.

Why?

Doing this is still risky! It is still overly complicated. If you are not behind TOR you are running a effing hotwallet on a public IP out in the open with experimental bitcoin smart contracts holding (in my case) waaaaay more value than I would feel comfortable losing.

Be your own bank, run your own node, build your own citadel... These are pie in the sky ideals.

Most people are going to STILL NEED BANKS. Most people are going to find it best to hire professionals to safeguard their money.

Again, the revolution is not that you HAVE to take all this responsibility yourself... it is that you CAN.

Anyway. Be careful out there fellow edge cutters.

And here's to the bull run that is still just barely getting cranked up! I have a feeling in a year or so this is going to be a pretty smug group.

Whoa, Well, from that viewpoint it seems pretty complicated. But if I make an analogy with the development of Linux maybe in the long term there will be GUI`s more user friendly like Ubuntu