A Gentleman's Node

Let's travel back to the time of yore, when the concept of a "Gentleman" was synonymous with honor, dignity, and a certain detachment from the mundane concerns of the working classes.

In those great days, a Gentleman was a man of means, who did not work, but who lived on income from his investments and improved lands, and could devote himself to interesting and dignified hobbies.

Many of these hobbies might intermingle with the man's deeply-held principles, for example, his particular interest in the permanent, world-wide abolition of economic oppression.

A typical Gentleman node runner, at his leisure

Running a node is fit for a Gentleman, because...

1. To run an effective routing node, a Gentleman needs to invest at least five or ten BTC, and keep those funds on his node. A Gentleman needs big channels, and his BTC needs to sit in these channels consistently, and not move hither and thither, or scurry around in a undignified manner.
2. As we've discussed, a Lightning Node is a hot wallet. If a Gentleman uses best practices, his funds probably won't be lost or stolen. But his BTC will be significantly more "at risk" when compared to keeping those funds in a cold, offline wallet.
3. The price of BTC is likely to appreciate in the coming years, as the empire to which the Gentleman belongs expands and strengthens, in no small part due to the exertions of the Gentleman and his peers.
4. Because the price of BTC is likely to appreciate, a Gentleman is advised to keep the vast majority of his BTC in cold, offline storage, and NOT deployed onto the Lightning Network.
5. Therefore, if a Gentleman is going to risk ten BTC on a Lightning node, he should have at least one-hundred BTC on a hardware wallet or otherwise in cold storage. (And perhaps a small cache of Pounds Sterling, for those occasional economic interactions with the lower classes.)
6. If a Gentleman keeps ten BTC on his node, and one-hundred BTC in cold storage, then he's either running a company, or he is a wealthy amateur, for whom running a Lightning Node could be an interesting sport or diversion, to entertain the Gentleman when he is not engaged with hunting with his dogs, or entertaining members of Society.
7. A Gentleman is unlikely (at least in the short term) to make much money from his routing node. But as a Gentleman, this doesn't concern him, as he's more interested in his vital cause: ending Fiat oppression.

A Gentleman never thinks of himself first!

To summarize: Running a lightning node is a good fit for a Bitcoin-rich, independently wealthy individual: That is, a gentleman.

It might also be a good fit for a company who has invested in BTC for its treasury, and wants to put some of these funds to work.

But I thought routing nodes could make money from fees?

Routing nodes do make money from fees. Not only that, but a few excitable organizations have recently claimed that "you can make 10% yield from a routing node!"

This is, put most simply, completely fucking untrue.

The (very) rough consensus among node runners (as of 2025)... is that they don't make much money.

Most analyses have ended up finding that, maybe, if you run a node well, you could make a 1% yearly return on your BTC assets.

1% is not a great return, considering you have to run a hot wallet.

But... actually nobody knows how much routing nodes are making!

The more you dive into forums, telegram groups, and other places where Gentleman node runners congregate, the more you realize something striking:

Nobody actually knows how much node runners are making.

In fact, there are a few reasons why those who run the biggest routing nodes, who might be making the most money in fees, might never tell the outside world how much they are making:

1. Making money through routing fees requires "discovering" profitable routes between other nodes. Once a node runner has discovered route(s) like this, they are unlikely to broadcast the fact to the world. If they did broadcast this, other node runners might try to replicate their channel graph in order to earn these fees.
2. There is a strong ethical argument against revealing any information gleaned from a node to the outside world. As we've seen, lightning is very private, but theoretically, if everyone who ran a routing node revealed their interior routing data to the world, an attacker might, for a given payment, be able to piece together at least an "incomplete" route of nodes that the payment travelled.

Routing nodes don't reveal their routing data because...

They don't have to: The Lightning Network is cleverly designed to conceal amounts moving through it. From the view of the public, only the total size of a channel can be seen -- not who opened the channel, not who is using the channel, and not the respective balances on each side of the channel.

So, for example, if your node "MyNode" has a channel with "BigOtherNode", and that channel is 0.5 BTC., any member of the public can see that two nodes, with aliases ["My Node", "BigOtherNode"], share between them 0.5 BTC.

But: Members of the public can not "watch" or "see" as payments move through this channel.

The "routing data", that is, the knowledge of the individual payment moving across node's "hop", to another node, is entirely private and secured by the LN's Onion Routing Protocol.

Also: Node operators are Gentlemen, and it's not gentlemanly to provide data that could be used by a threat actor to break the privacy of any payment.

Final thought: Running a routing node is an investment in the future

Ultimately, running a routing node is an investment in the future. You probably won't make much profit, especially when you are starting out, but it's entirely possible that the Lightning Network will, just in the next few years, grow to 10x or 100x or 1000x the size. And if the price of BTC keeps appreciating, it might be that in just a few years, running a well-established node could be a very good business.