Is it worth connecting to popular channels?

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Is it worth it or beneficial to just connect like a 3mil sat channel to a popular channel without them necessarily knowing or be willing to open a channel back to you?

(ie: one of the the top 100 performing channels on TerminalWeb)

Thanks

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Connecting to large channels sounds like a good idea, and usually is, to guarantee a better chance of routing your payments. However, it’s not the most beneficial thing for a routing node. When connected to a larger node the chances your channel will be used is slim. Older more reliable channels will be used first. You could lower fees but then your channel will out of balance very quickly and cost more than you make to re-balance. The best channels to connect to for a routing node is those channels that make a route where one wasn’t before. ex. you connect two major clusters of nodes that didn’t have a direct route before your channel. Lightning is a moving target of whats best. Constantly managing channel fees, balancing channels and looking for the most efficient routes. It’s a delicate balancing act that is best achieved by human interaction as some have tried bots with little success.

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Thank you for the very detailed and well broken down response. Your points totally make sense.
I am glad I didn’t jump to do this.

  • where would you suggest I look besides within this forum?

I’ve made a 3mil Sat 3-way triangle channel request on https://lightningnetwork.plus/swaps/2272 about 6 hrs ago to see if I can find anyone on there to connect to. Not sure if this is the way to go either

4

Check out Plebnet on Telegram. Most people don’t divulge the best routing information because then you become competition and they get less sats. Plebnet seems to throw out that thinking and are pretty helpful.