Today I’m writing about refining & clearly defining my goals and funding the wallet I linked Day 1. Day 1 also consisted of prep, resource gathering, defining terms, etc.

Goals

Most tutorials seemed to be geared towards just setting up a Lightning Node for your own personal payments/use. My goal is actually to become a NODE OPERATOR. I’m going to set up & test it for personal use, but then start set things up to be an operator.

BTW, these days are not necessarily always contiguous. Life happens. After I finished Day 1, I had to get things ready for my Dad’s visit and then we hung out all weekend, visiting my eldest son at college, going to the football game, etc.

Now I’m back and had to figure out where I left off…oof! Gotta get back into that mental space… That Lightning linked wallet I created on Day 1 needs to be funded. I explain funding my wallet below, which, after I decided on the best option for me, just took me a few seconds to actually do. I briefly explain the various methods, which will hopefully save you some time, because, dayum, just going through all those options and documenting them here took quite a bit of mine.

Funding the Wallet

So, on Day 1 I’d set up a wallet in BlueWallet that links to my bitcoin full node running Umbrel. I needed to fund it with some small amounts for testing and discovered that it’s ridiculously easy. In BlueWallet, you select the lightning linked wallet (we’ll call it LLW) and touch the “Manage Funds” button right under its name. Your options are:

  • Refill – this lets you transfer funds from an already existing wallet in BlueWallet. You choose the amount and also choose the fee, which relates to the speed of the transfer (approx times are: fast 10 min, medium 3 hours, slow 1 day).
  • Refill with External Wallet – same as above, only you have a QR code to scan or and address that you can copy.
  • Refill with Bank Card – you’re sent to a “Buy BTC” page which is pre-filled with a $300 purchase for .00559 BTC (at the time of this writing). This is run by MoonPay (AML/KYC rulese apply) and the Moonpay fee was $15, Network fee $0.55.
    • FEES:
      • This Moonpay fee was NOT a flat fee, rather a flat percentage. I changed to $1000 and the fee jumped to $50. So the fee is 5%. Maybe that goes down a bit for higher amounts, but doubtful. Kind of steep, IMO.
      • Network fee remained $0.55.
    • BTC price comparison (snapshot), it pays to shop around. With the underlying price of bitcoin being so different, along with fees varying so much, that’s a whole separate blog topic for me to cover…Of course, DYOR.
  • Exchange: This brings you to ZIGZAG, where you need to you a Lightning enabled wallet (Hey now, that’s THIS wallet, woot!). Their fees are advertised as being around 3%.

Long story short, I used the regular refill to move some funds from one pre-existing BlueWallet to the LLW. I chose the medium fees option, which says about 3 hours and in my case happened almost instantaneously.

Logging back into my bitcoin node, I am super excited to see my LLW funds posted. Some more experienced users might find “super excited” to be weird, but every new success on this journey to sovereignty is a point of happiness for me.

I took a pic of my teeny-tiny balance to post here, but then was appalled, from a privacy standpoint, at all the metadata associated with it. Even AFTER stripping it of “all possible data”. Sooo, I’m working on beefing up the anonymity on my network before I post stuff like that. Yet another blog topic for another day!

Now to research Inbound & Outbound liquidity…I’ll report on my progress & hopefully have a few channels open for the next report!