Will do I appreciate all your help! 

 Still thinking on this. I see Cashu mints as a low cost liquidity provider. I proved that to myself with the payment system I built. Now thinking how I could provide liquidity in exchange for some collateral.  

 Hmm. Okay I will look into it! 

 i pay like 10ksat per month to rent a LN node from alby, so about $3-4

there are channel peers you can use that allow you to make channels as low as 100,000 sats, which is like $70

you can run this on your own VPS, also, but you are probably going to end up paying the same and they are experts in deploying to their own rented VPS infrastructure 

 Well I already have the machines, my node is finally up, and it doesn't cost me any more to run than the rest of my services :/

I'm thinking a good single 500k sat channel would be enough for a little while and maybe 1m sat in the near future? 

 you really need two channels, one you fully pay, the other you pay a fee (typically about 20ksat) one will receive, the other you can send with, and as they progress they balance

and as i said, you can open 100k channels, there are channel peers that allow this, i'd suggest doing a 200 and 300k out and in for your case 

 So I should try to find someone willing to open channels that size? I think that's going to be plenty for now  

 If you can't pay a lightning invoice then you'll have to buy credits. You can pay with another lightning wallet if you have one.
Magma is a central marketplace for buying liquidity and channels to your lightning node. 

 I can't get a lightning wallet if I can't get a lightning wallet :) 

 Use https://BancoLibre.com and referral code "fire" and you'll then be lightning compatible. 

 So I'm needed some kind of boostraping then? I was looking into looping because I can send on-chain funds for channel open. Also no KYC or smart phone for me.  

 its tricky, I'm still getting my head around it... paid 16k sats to Megalith for them to open a 1mil sat channel with me and I'm hoping to be able to reuse this indefinitely by looping out through strike as they have free onchain withdrawals 

 Good to know! That kind of what I was thinking. So I don't have any custodial wallets, because I haven't found any that I can just jump into from a web browser without KYC. It's either mobile, or kyc, both, or broken, so figured my own node was the way.  

 any other way of contacting me is fine too (see https://github.com/laanwj), doesn't have to be DM here 😀 

no, i don't know any way to figure out if a lightning node is connectable, except connecting to it from another node-or maybe simply checking the address+port is reachable using `nc -v` or such

there may be websites that try it for you and report, maybe amboss.space or other lightning explorers, but not sure  

 Awesome thank you! Yeah I was just poking with telnet and other public nodes to see if I could at least replicate connections. I haven't found any services that seem to offer testing like that. I'll have to keep poking! 

 oh sure telnet works too, suggested nc because it can also connect to Tor addresses (using `-x 127.0.0.1:9050`) and telnet isn't that commonly installed anymore 😀  

 Old school :) I'm just on clearnet for now, my load balancer IPS are public so I'm not too worried about tor yet unless I need to start worrying about my ISP. I'm not even sure I set my node up to connect over tor correctly yet.  

Between us, only my servers are on bleeding edge distros/updates ;) 

 what kind of load balancing setup are you using for lightning ? i didn't know that was even a thing 

 For lighting it's not load balancing, just traffic forwarding from my public IPS. But I assume larger nodes have to be doing something more than a single instance :)  

 well, yes, LSPs and lightning payment providers handling tons of payments tend to have elaborate routing setups and multiple lightning nodes they load balance over, but maybe a bit early to worry about if you're just getting started 😀 

anyhow, happy to help test connectivity, just let me know once you get there 

 I'm always on the lookout for enterprise solutions to simple problems XD

Yeah thanks again! 

 If you care about privacy there is one more advanced setup:

you create a node with all the connectivity, channels, etc.

then you create a private node with one private channel to your "public" node.

But give your strugle with funding your channels it's probably not for you, tho... 

 Not yet. I have to convince myself it's okay to have that many sats tied up in an extremely hot wallet. I'm a stamped steel cold wallet kind of guy. Coins go in, and don't come back out. 

 I don't think it's possible. You can't run the same node in multiple instances. ever. That would lead to forced closes of all channels if there was a slightest difference in their state. 

 right ! it can't be done by simply running multiple lightning nodes with the same key, that would become a mess
some lightning software (Eclair, for example) can be explicitly configured to split a node over multiple servers
i don't remember exactly and couldnt find the details yesterday but there are also some approaches possible where the last hop is virtual 

 hmm, virtual hops, interesting. never heard of it. Thank!