Measuring Lightning Nodes



Summary:

To measure the number of nodes and channels in the Lightning Network, one can connect to any LN node and set the initial_routing_sync flag in the init message. This will prompt the peer to send the whole gossip dump, which contains information on every public node/channel except channel capacities. If one wants to query their c-lightning node without making any changes, they can use the listnodes and listchannels commands with lightning-cli. Alternatively, explorer sites like 1ml.org can provide this information without having to run a node or perform any actions.


Updated on: 2023-05-25T01:58:34.322333+00:00