The Daily Moon

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Nitesh Balusu | Connect the World

The hosts of Connect the World podcast were happy that he had some time to chat with them on Connect The World! Always online helping the Lightning community and building great stuff. Mostly on Alex Bosworth’s Balance of Satoshis and his addition to it: lndboss. And if you’re thinking of switching to a bitcoin related job? Nitesh has some advice for you too!

Watch or listen to the full interview or start reading below! Enjoy!

Nitesh Balusu | Lightning

What was your first experience with the lightning network and do you still know what you did/saw at that moment?

Played with WoS and bought a gift card on bitrefill, was amazed on how it worked.

I’ve read that you like RasiBolt the most out of all LND distributions. Why is that?

It has a higher learning curve but it builds everything from source and not depend on non-FOSS distributions like Umbrel which are trending in the wrong direction. I really like Raspiblitz as well.

Are you also experimenting with Eclair, Core Lightning, or Liquid?

I am most interested in experimenting with LDK, there are plans at Foundry to play with all implementations.

You’re running your node (or one of your nodes) on Amazon EC2. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services Cloud.
What are the advantages for you of running your node in the Cloud?

Two main reasons, reliability and scalability

You like to run a rebalance on your node from another system to reduce CPU usage. Can you explain this, and what is your advice for rebalancing?

Running several parallel rebalances takes up resources and it quickly gets expensive when you run a node in the cloud. Rebalancing reallocates liquidity where its necessary, always rebalance your highest flowing channels.

Do you run the automated script for changing your fees and rebalancing? Like Charge-LND and/or LNDg?

I do not, I am an old school guy and prefer to do my stuff manually.

Suppose you think about the future of the Lightning Network. Already some businesses outsource running a node. Do you think everyone should own a node? And why is that?

I don’t think everyone should run a node, I would be interested in a small sized community based trusted system.

You wrote a Twitter thread and article on LinkedIn about some things you learned about Lightning channel management. What are the most important things that every Node operator needs to know?

Allocating liquidity and learning recovery processes because sats are precious. I also think every node operator should put in effort to learn to use command line.

With more adoption of Lightning, it seems that more non-custodial services will be inevitable. Do you see this as a risk/trade-off?

As bitcoiners we always want non-custodial solutions, I would love for more of them which are as simple to use as custodial solutions.

Do you think it’s essential to both hodl and use Bitcoin through Lightning as a medium of exchange?

Yes, I think there will be a point in the future where hodling will happen over lightning. It could be uneconomical for people to hodl small amounts onchain.

Is it possible to use Lightning for all your daily needs in your neighborhood?

Not really, still far off from that..

In a Twitter Space, I heard someone say that orange pilling starts at home with all your family members. As you also like to educate people about Lightning. Do you have an excellent orange pilling tip for our listeners?

I am really bad at orange pilling lol, I couldn’t even properly orange pill my wife yet. I really like talking about bitcoin over beer though, people are willing to listen.

Alex Bosworth integrated & tested begin July a new feature:
Opening a balanced channel in a ring with up to 420 nodes in one transaction! What new possibilities and opportunities will this feature bring?

This makes onboarding new nodes super easy and also cheaper, we could have a nice market place like LN+ that could integrate into this feature.

Developments in the Lightning Network and all tools around it are happening at an incredible speed! So what’s the most necessary to develop to get more pre-coiners aboard? And what is being done to make it more user-friendly?

I think lightning needs to be integrated more into the digital circular economy, there are so many places online where lightning could be used and we don’t use it today which is hindering adoption.

What is the biggest mistake you made related to Lightning?

I blew up my node twice lol

We talked with many guests about how important speed and deliverability are for adopting the Lightning Network. For example, nobody wants to wait 8 seconds for a payment to be processed. What do you think can help to make the Lightning Network much faster in the near future?

I think we have to accept Tor probably does not have a future for public routing nodes. 2nd thing that needs to be improved is path finding.

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Nitesh Balusu | Bos Foundry Digital

Alex Bosworth created Balance of Satoshis, a great script and must-have for managing your LND Node channel balances and much more! You’re the most significant contributor to the repository on Github next to Alex, of course. How did this start, and what is your relationship with Alex?

I just decided to start with something I already use and loved, it was very random. Alex has been like a mentor to me in my lightning career.

In June of this year, you released the first version of the front-end for Balance of Satoshis with the name LndBoss. Excellent for people who don’t feel comfortable using the command line. Now you’re at version 1.15.9 already! When and why did you come up with the idea to create a GUI around bos?

It just came up because I see how powerful bos is and how so many node runners struggled with command line.

Is LndBoss ready to install for all users running all different LND platforms?

Yes, I also submitted a PR for umbrel app store submission, it’ll probably be included in the next release.

What are your plans with LndBoss for the future? Are you also thinking about adding new features to boss together with Alex?

The goal for now is to integrate as many bos commands as possible and then work towards automation. I think Alex is already busy with multiple projects. 😀

 

As we mentioned earlier, you Tweeted at the end of Juli about switching your career to work at the Bitcoin company. We know that you’re starting at Foundry Digital or FoundryX. What kind of company is this, and what services do they provide?

They are the world’s largest mining pool now in terms of hash rate, their parent company DCG has several other bitcoin stuff like GBTC, staking products etc

You mentioned that you would build apps on the Lightning Network. What will be your role there, and what will you build or create?

All I can say for now is industrial scale lightning, I can’t disclose other stuff for now.

How difficult was this road for you to switch your career and end up working from within the Bitcoin and Lightning Space?

It took quite some effort because I had to start from scratch, fun journey though. Learnt a lot.

When do people want to contribute to bitcoin and Lightning? What would be your advice for them to start in this space?

Everyone asks me how and where to start, best place to start is always things you already use. And you don’t have to write code to contribute, everyone has different skills that they can utilize to contribute to the ecosystem.

In Episode 25, we spoke to Peter from AZHODL. He runs a fantastic mining project with a Bitmain S19j powered by Solar Panels. His statement is that every Bitociner should mine! FoundryX is a trusted marketplace for buying and selling cryptocurrency mining machines. Do you think about mining yourself one day, or are you mining already?

I have been wanting to start from almost an year now, hopefully soon.

Do you think that the ability of renewables in Bitcoin mining is viable?

Yes, absolutely. Miners always want cheaper and efficient sources of energy.

Extra

We talked to Olga Ukolova from Pandora Core in Episode 31, and she told us that finding people skilled at the Rust Programming Language is challenging. Why is rust so crucial in your opinion and make you also notice that few people know this?

I think Rust is a very nice language to include in your tech stack because of how its designed, Rust is fairly a new language so it’s not very easy to find devs who work on it.

What do you think are the most noteworthy developments of the Lightning Network? It can be use cases but also on an adoption or protocol level?

Very excited for Taro.

What kind of layer three solutions would you like to see soon?

Bitcoin is often criticized for not being able to DeFi stuff like what most Alt coins do, hopefully we solutions in that space.

We have LND (lightning labs), c-lightning (Blockstream), eclair (Acinq), and some more… These are all implementations on the second layer. Do you run/test them all?

On mainnet I have only tried LND, I did try c-lightning on testnet. I am most interested in LDK though.

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