Key facts:
Latin America barely concentrates 0.83% of the nodes of the Lightning network.
Routing payments can generate passive income for node operators.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network continues to see steady growth, but this impulse is not reflected much in Latin America, where the strengthening of the infrastructure looks at a disadvantage. This at least when buying the number of public nodes that operate by regions.
At the time of writing this note, there are 38,814 nodes on the Lightning network around the world, of which 17,136 are nodes with public IP, according to the map of the development company ACINQ, behind the Eclair implementation and the Phoenix wallet.
This ACINQ explorer allows you to clearly see that there is a much lower number of public nodes located in Latin America relative to other regions such as North America or Europe.
The data presented by the ACINQ explorer takes into account the public IP announced by the node and may not be accurate, as the company points out on its website, however, it offers an estimated vision regarding the geolocation of the nodes of the net.
The image presented by the ACINQ explorer reveals that Latin America has few nodes on the Lightning network. Source: ACINQ Lightning Explorer.
In any case, an investigation carried out by analysts from the University of Vienna and the Blockstream company, indicates that in effect a Most of the Lightning Network nodes are located in North America, with 44.8%, and Europe with 43.1%.
The remaining nodes are located in Asia with 6.2%, Oceania with 2.2% and, finally, South America and Africa, each with 0.8% and 0.6%.
Between the Latin American countries most active in Lightning Brazil stands out with 9 nodes and 120 channels; also Mexico with 3 nodes and 46 channels; while Colombia appears with 2 nodes and 46 channels. Venezuela has 3 nodes with 8 channels; Argentina shows 7 nodes with 9 channels; Peru, 1 node with 2 channels; and Chile with 4 nodes with 4 channels. As a Hispanic country, it is worth mentioning Spain, which has 29 nodes with 131 operating channels, according to data from 1ml.com.
Running a Lightning node can be lucrative
Less presence of geolocated nodes in a region may be due to a lack of disclosure of the incentives for companies and individuals to run nodes, even though they may route payments to generate revenue, which is a food for thought.
A well connected node can offer passive income. Alex Bosworth, a liquidity leader at Lightning Labs, for example, has made up to $ 30,000 in six months routing payments.
Bosworth has been one of the most active developers and promoter of the advances of the network, being one of the first active nodes in the network. This gives it an advantage by having a greater number …….
Source: https://cvbj.biz/few-latinos-take-advantage-of-routing-bitcoin-lightning-payments.html
