Run your own mainnet Lightning Node

Go from nothing to stickers using the instant Lightning network

6 min readJan 21, 2018

With Lightning’s payment channels, Bitcoin has a chance to prove it can scale. I eagerly anticipated the release of the v1.0 Lightning specification. I wasn’t motivated enough to run it, however, until Blockstream launched its online store that only accepts Lightning payments. Stickers? Count me in.

The goal of this tutorial is to get you from no bitcoin node and no lightning node to running fully validating nodes — in under 24 hours. The majority of hours come from syncing the Bitcoin blockchain, so I recommend starting this process before you go to bed and finishing it when you wake up.

This tutorial assumes you know how to spin up a Digital Ocean box (or something similar) running Docker. You won’t need to understand the internals — just copy and paste commands — but I encourage you to read up on all of this. I’ll put an appendix of relevant resources at the end.

This tutorial assumes you are decent at the command line and linux. I’d prefer not to have to also explain what shell scripts, cat, etc. are.

If you don’t have a full sync’d bitcoin node, plan to execute this tutorial in two parts:

Before you go to bed: Spin up your linux box and start syncing your full node.
After you wake up: Spin up your lightning node, feed it bitcoins, and acquire stickers!

Got all that? Ready to be #reckless? Here we go.

Part I

Spin up your Docker instance

First, get your linux box up and running. With Digital Ocean, it’s super-simple: Create a droplet with > 200GB of Disk Space. Over the course of 24 hours, this will cost you ~$2.90.

Digital Ocean has a tab at the top named ‘One-click apps’ that enables you spin up a droplet with Docker pre-installed. After selecting all the right boxes, add your ssh key and click the ‘Create’ button.

After SSH’ing into your new node, we can start syncing the bitcoin node. Now, I understand there’s several implementations to choose from — lnd and btcd seem to be getting more attention — however, I’m just going to go with the basics here and use bitcoind and lightningd. I’m not sure it’s the best choice, but it should be pretty easy to port this process over to different libraries if you want.

Start syncing the Bitcoin chain

What we’re doing here is setting up a bitcoind (version 0.15.1) daemon process running on a local, private docker network. The blockchain data gets saved to /scratch and we expose the ports necessary for the bitcoin and lightning nodes to listen for peers (8333 and 9735 respectively). We’re hiding the RPC ports so they’re not exposed to the public.

Once you run this command, it should take about 12 hours to sync, and around 170GB of disk space. Periodically, you should tail the logs. Once the date reaches today, you should be fully sync’d.

Next, we’re going to set up the bitcoin command line tool:

I cat’d the shell script for bitcoin-cli in the gist above. It contains only a single docker command that spins up, executes the command, then cleans itself up. Please note that since we’ve hidden the RPC ports, we must to run the CLI on the same network as the docker processes. Once you create the script, give it a test run. See my output above.

Sleep!

Sleep ‘n sync.

Part II

Spin up your lightning node on mainnet

Once you’ve verified your bitcoin node remains sync’d with the network (just make sure the blockheight matches the latest blockheight from e.g. blockchain.info), you should spin up your lightning node. The process remains similar to bitcoind, except faster (~2 minutes).

As above, so below. Notice we’re running the lightning node on the same docker network interface as bitcoin, so the RPC clients can chat with one another. And we’ll use the same trick with the lightning command line tool:

Congratulations, you’ve spun up a full lightning node! The only thing left is to connect it to other nodes and open payment channels. This was the most difficult part for me to figure out, but also the most rewarding.

Feed your lightning node some Ƀcoin

I wanted $20 of stickers, so I sent .003 bitcoin (~$30) to my lightning node. Remember, this is all very new and buggy. Only play with what you’re willing to lose. In order to receive delicious coin, you must generate a wallet address.

It should take about 60 minutes for your payment to confirm. There’s my 300,000 satoshis, ready and raring to go!

Connect to another node

This is where things start to get interesting. I used this website to find other mainnet lightning nodes. I decided to connect to another highly connected node, but feel free to choose whichever one calls to you. Remember, the higher the connectivity, the fewer expected hops for your payment route, and the lower your fees. I chose SLEEPYARK (see photo).

Next, we connect to the node then open a payment channel. N.B.: I got most of my inspiration from the c-lightning documentation.

Unhappily, when I followed these steps, my bitcoin node had a very low tx fee setting, which you can see here. 40 sat/B is no good! But somehow I got lucky. It’s entirely possible there’s something I’m missing about opening a channel which makes it cheaper per byte. I would err on the safe side, however, which is why I included a step in my gist for paying 500 sat/B. Here’s a good site to calculate a reasonable fee.

Ok! Once you’ve waited for 6 confirmations on the transaction for opening a lightning channel, we can move on to the finale — paying Blockstream for stickers. Head over to the store, add some stickers to your cart, and arrive at the payment page.

That long string of numbers is what’s known as a BOLT11 address. Copy and paste yours into a command to decode exactly what’s going on. Here’s mine.

Pretty cool, right? It contains a bunch of details about my order with Blockstream. One of the decoded fields is payee, which is the node ID of the lightning node you’re trying to route your payment. We can use this ID to calculate how much it will cost to route a payment to that node, and then we pay the node!

There’s an interesting thing to note here. The payment hasn’t settled to the bitcoin blockchain. It still only exists in this payment channel and lightning network. Yet, due to the nature of the lightning protocol, Blockstream isn’t at risk of payment default. They own the satoshis, and there’s nothing I can do to get them back. Pretty amazing!

Now, I await my stickers. Blockstream being the dreaded Trusted Third Party…here’s hoping they will fulfill their end of the bargain! Unhappily, meatspace ain’t as safe as bitspace.