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As a result of all my thoughts and experiments, I've concluded that I can't find any optimal way to effectively earn money and maintain a high flow. It turns out that when you increase the commission, at some point the number of transactions drops significantly, but you earn more, and this happens not regularly but in bursts. It's very difficult to determine where you're right and where you're not. Therefore, I got fed up with all of this, abandoned it, and set fixed commissions on the channels. Initially, I set them to zero entirely, and the flow increased significantly. Now, if memory serves me right, my commission is 10 ppm, and about the same flow is occurring as when commissions were completely zero, but now I'm earning around $5-10 per day. It's possible to earn more, of course, but I just got tired of constantly changing the code and adjusting commissions. Of course, when talking about earnings, it's important to keep in mind that I'm simply taking the numbers from the commissions. But you have to consider that every day some channels close randomly or at the request of the remote party, some channels get severed due to protocol mismatches with the remote side, or sometimes I open channels to nodes with which I don't have existing channels, and satoshis are also spent on that. So it seems like all earnings are being consumed. But there's an interesting point. As you know, you can buy a channel on my website, and that server, LND, which manages it, has been showing me over the past few years that, in total, more than one Bitcoin has been accumulated from all the payments for opening channels. I keep track of these statistics; I don't have the data on hand right now, but it's roughly around one and a half Bitcoin earned already. This includes the amount I'm trying to cover for opening and future closing of channels, as well as the percentage I set in my source code based on the size of the channel. So, in principle, you can probably earn money, perhaps by selling channel capacity rather than earning from commissions. Moreover, you have to consider that over the entire time my network has been running, which is about six and a half years, the difference between what I can get back when closing all channels and what I put into the system shows that I've lost approximately 3.3 Bitcoin. This includes several instances where my nodes were penalized and all funds were confiscated. There were also moments when there was a bug in the LND server, and breaches occurred. If memory serves, this amounts to about 0.8 Bitcoin in total. The rest consists of funds spent on commissions, opening, and subsequently closing cooperative or force-closed channels, which I was very actively opening in the beginning.
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