Welcome to Lightning Network & Bitcoin Nodes
This course has two halves. In the first, you’ll learn how the Lightning Network moves bitcoin through payment channels, how payments find their way across the network, which wallet suits you, and how to pay and get paid. In the second, you’ll set up your own Bitcoin full node and Lightning node at home, and learn how to keep the money in their channels safe.
What you’ll cover
- How Lightning works (Lessons 4.1 and 4.2): channels, the penalty that keeps both sides honest, HTLCs, inbound liquidity, routing fees, invoices, and who can see your payments.
- Lightning wallets and payments (Lessons 4.3 and 4.4): Phoenix, Zeus, Fedimint and Wallet of Satoshi compared on keys, fees, backups and privacy, then your first payments and what to do when one fails.
- Your own Bitcoin node (Lessons 4.5 to 4.7): why a full node matters, how Umbrel, Start9, RaspiBlitz and myNode differ, and a step-by-step setup on a Raspberry Pi 5 with your wallet connected to it.
- Your own Lightning node (Lessons 4.8 and 4.9): opening channels, paying from your phone through your node, what routing earns, and the backups and watchtowers that protect channel funds.
Lesson 4.10 reviews the whole course, with ten questions to check your understanding.
Before you start
This course builds on Courses 1 to 3, especially Course 2’s lessons on seed phrases and Lightning wallets. For the first half, a phone is all you need. The hands-on lessons use a Raspberry Pi 5 or a mini-PC with a 2 TB SSD; you can read them first and decide later whether to build a node.
