Quote from: btcltcdigger on June 17, 2020, 03:09:39 PM

Damn this is discouraging. 15 satoshi in 2 weeks...wouldn't even be worth the cost if BTC was $1m.
But oh well, maybe it picks up when more and more ppl use lightning

The data from my post mentioned by Rizzrack is not really relevant; I should change that answer. Take this article from 2018 as an example for that year.

There are currently 25 nodes owned by LNbig.com. They provide about 52,19% (497,2647581 BTC out of 952,86 BTC) of the whole network's liquidity. I can't find any data on their recent earnings, but their Twitter account shares the amount of transactions and BTC passed through their nodes in the last 24 hours from time to time. You can clearly see the surge of the transactions in the last few months. Starting from 100-800 transactions in March and going to over 4000 in May. That is a huge change.

I have tried to calculate the possible earnings using the fee formula (basefee + (amount * feerate / 1000000) and the data from this tweet, but my results were far too off.

The 3rd March seems to have been the most profitable day. 161 routed transactions worth 2.24602985 BTC paid in total 219484 sat (0.00219484 BTC) in fees. At the current price of Bitcoin ($9300), it is about $20! Still, don't forget about the amount of coins locked up in all the nodes and the cost of opening transaction all channels.

The 24th January is more impressive to me. 186 routed transactions worth 0.60161437 BTC paid in total 172378 sat (0.00172378 BTC) in fees. It is about $16 now.

Alex Bosworth shared that his node charged 0.25% per transaction and routed about $10,000/month. He didn't say which node he was referring to, but since he is the CEO of yalls.org, we can assume that it was this one. That is actually interesting because of the significantly smaller capital.

Coming back to earth, you are not going to earn much if your node doesn't provide enough liquidity. However, it is also worth mentioning that multipart payments are now available in all implementations. Once more wallets start supporting them, the earnings of well-connected, small nodes might increase.

Note: Keep in mind that 952,86 BTC is the amount of the funds locked up in public channels. Private channels are... private so we don't know how many of them exactly there are and what is their balance (although that might not be the case [5.4.2]). Such channels do not route any payments.