Comment by TheWama on 06/01/2018 at 20:40 UTC

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View submission: ⚡ Lightning Network Megathread ⚡

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The hardware requirements are very modest, much less than running a full bitcoin node for example, which has significant bandwidth and storage needs. Lightning transactions and communication is very light-weight by comparison, because the transactions need only be shared between the parties involved rather than everyone in the network, so the overall resources required to transmit and store them is much lower. A mini-PC or raspberry pi would do.

Yes half a bitcoin would be plenty for most individual expense cases - consider that the size of the channel just needs to be big enough to accommodate your net payments over time, so in most cases / for most expenses, 10K+ USD would accommodate a lot of daily payment volume.

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Comment by DevilsAdvocate9x1 at 06/01/2018 at 21:19 UTC

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Does a node need to be on 24/7? Will there be thin clients.

Comment by DevilsAdvocate9x1 at 06/01/2018 at 21:19 UTC

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Does a node need to be on 24/7? Will there be thin clients.

Comment by btc_throwaway1337 at 06/01/2018 at 21:56 UTC

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Excellent! Thanks so much for the quick and thorough response! Is there a particular OS flavor that you'd personally recommend?

Also, regarding funding the channel: if I funded it at 10k USD as you mentioned, is that basically a static liquidity value? So, for any transaction less than 10k USD, someone could use my lightning node / channel? However, if the transaction was higher than that, they'd have to find a channel available with that level of liquidity? I'm still a bit fuzzy on the whole channel funding bit... clearly! :-)