Downloading the BTC blockchain to the node took about three days. Last weekend, I was able to install and open the app Thunderhub to run my node. The first step was to send BTC to the node's BTC wallet. That is the source of BTC that is used to open channels. The node also has a Lightning wallet address.
I used LightningNetwork.Plus to open most of my 22 current channels. They have several services, but one is that two others and I form a "liquidity triangle." A opens a channel to B. B opens and channel to C, and C opens one back to A. They are useful to quickly give my node two channels for the price of opening just one. Also, one of the channels, the one opened to me, is fully funded on the inbound side to give me inbound liquidity.
As I was doing this, I also opened two channels to merchants that sell gift cards for BTC and other crypto. The hope is that these channels will be "fee farms" as people use them to buy gift cards by routing Lightning payments through my node.
I've had two people open channels to me, unsolicited. That may be a good sign that my node is showing up on searches as "good," that it is well-connected, or that its name and description are attractive to people.
Regarding channels, I'm finding that evenings in my time zone and weekends tend to have lower on-chain fees. Because the only way to earn BTC is by a channel forwarding Satoshis, or Sats (*1), the lower the opening cost, the sooner the channel will be in the positive.
Another tactic here seems to focus on larger channels. If it costs me 1,000 Sats to open a channel and that channel is only 50,000 Sats, it will have to do a lot of work back and forth before it pays for its opening cost. If it costs the same to open a 5,000,000 channel, it can more quickly pay for itself via its fees.
Going forward, I'm going to set a target of 4 to 5 million Sats for channels I open.
For channels that are opened to me, since they are "free" from my point-of-view, I'll let them be any size. Also, I might as well keep them open as long as the other person wants them to be open, for they'll only feed me liquidity and increase my routing capacity.
*1 = A Satoshi is 1/100,000,000th of a BTC or 0.00000001 BTC.
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