TLDR: How do I manage my small node for personal use?
Recently I set up a BTC/LN node using Raspiblitz. It was a lot of fun getting it to the point it is currently at but I have a few questions that I couldn't find out by doing my own research. Mostly my questions at this point are on your personal opinions rather than how to's.
My privacy is important to me but I'm unsure just how private I need to be. Sometimes I think I'm just paranoid or being overly cautious when I need'nt be. I set up my node to connect via Tor because I worry about things like my ISP knowing what I'm using my bandwidth for and potentially throttling or disconnecting my service. I live in the US so this concern might be unwarranted. I also worry about people seeing my IP on places like 1ML and finding out who I am IRL. I have to remind myself that I probably don't have enough money for someone to go through the effort of using this information against me. So I'm stuck wondering if its worth routing over Tor at all.
I only need two wallets. A spending wallet and a savings wallet. The savings wallet should be on hardware when I eventually get one. My question is do I have a reason to connect my hardware wallet to my node at all? I'm only planning on sending TO my hardware, never from it (at least for many years). I didn't see a lot of guides on how to connect a hardware wallet to raspiblitz so it honestly seemed like it was not common to do it.
The spending wallet should be on my phone so I can make purchases regardless if I'm away from home or not. I saw a few guides on how to connect Zeus and Zap to the node even over Tor with various tactics like DynamicDNS and Orbot. Someone mentioned that DynamicDNS defeats the purpose of routing through Tor anyways so maybe it's not worth the hassle? Is it possible right now to have the best of both worlds or at least a reasonable balance between privacy and convenience? I also like the idea of being able to manage my channels when I'm away from home as well but this is less important.
My next concern has to do with routing. I understand the fees I could potentially gain by routing transactions are almost zero. That's fine, I'm not doing it for that, it would just be kind of cool to see something show up on my forwarding history and know that my node helped someone make a payment. Obviously I could never have as much capacity as ACINQ or one of the many online casinos but my (probably misguided) understanding is that I could still be helpful if I balance my channels properly, if not now then possibly later on when lightning gets more usage. Does anyone have any thoughts or resources on managing smaller capacity channels? My plan for balancing is to just buy something using a channel with bitrefill or foldapp so that I have in-bound capacity and using autopilot for outbound channels. Is that a good plan? Questions I've been wondering are things like "who should I connect to as a peer?", "how do I choose who I open channels with?", "is it better to connect to the big nodes or with smaller nodes like myself?", "are there any privacy concerns I haven't considered when opening channels or connecting to peers?"
Sorry for the wall of text. I just generally like to have things organized and a lot of that is learning all of the options and how to weigh them. Thanks in advance.
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