Reduce fees on the Lightning network

A lot of people think the Lightning network has no fees, but that's not exactly correct. There are still fees involved, and they can add up over time. For instance, I did a transaction for 0.027BTC and ended up paying a fee of 0.000164BTC, which is pretty close to what you’d find on-chain. Is there any way to cut down those fees? Like, does the choice of node on Electrum (ACINQ, Electrum trampoline, or trampoline hodlistreco) affect the fees I’ll pay in the future?

If you run your own lightning node and open a channel with another node, there is no fee needed. If you depend on people's channel, or not connected directly to someone, you will need to pay little amount in fee. This is not possible as of now.

The 0.000164BTC is around $7 it is still high maybe the operator is asking for high transaction fees or maybe the fees he is talking about are the ones he paid for opening a channel. @OP can you make it clear in what node did you open a channel ACINQ, Electrum trampoline, trampoline hodlistreco?

LN transfer fees are way less and it can't be around $7 unless the transacted amount is a few thousand bitcoins which is unlikely possible to happen so yeah OP is confusing the LN transfer fee with the fee that he paid while opening the channel. LN node operators set the base fee as less as possible and they are not doing it to make any financial benefits in my opinion.

What you you mean "this is not possible"? This is the fee I paid! This was on Electrum trampoline. No this was for a lightning payment. Since because some of you don't seem to believe me:

Yes, it depends on the route that your payment had to take to reach the receiver's channel. The total fee depends on the number of channels that it went through and their respective routing fees. The more expensive channels that it need to hop into, the more fee that it'll accumulate. The sent amount is quite high too, it may have been broken-down into multiple separate small amounts to send the full amount. In terms of those hard-coded trampoline nodes, those have different connections to the lightning network so it could be cheaper if one has shorter route to the recipient and has active channels to nodes with lower routing fees. But finding which one will total a lower fee requires intensive research (for the indications above) or testing. The only way I know is to open a channel directly to the recipient's node. It's recommended if it's an exchange's lightning node where you would deposit and withdraw bitcoins frequently. Usually, exchanges with lightning deposit/withdrawal option have a note with "connect to our lightning node" message or similar.

I'd expect LN to be used for small transactions. This is worth more than $1000, and I would keep such amounts on-chain. But: I've seen exchanges that support LN withdrawals, and it's either free, or something like 5 sats. So that makes me think they don't pay high routing fees. I've used several LN wallets in the past, but never this one. Does it at least show you the fee before sending the payment? You paid 0.6% fee, which is a lot. From what I've seen, most LN node owners "complain" that they don't make any profit. It sounds like the only route for your (high) payment was through a node with much higher fees than average. I can't really tell you how to avoid this

I was thinking if there is any indication which ACINQ vs. Electrum trampoline vs. trampoline hodlistreco node is the one with the lowest fees. Apparently this is unknown.. Electrum doesn't show the fee. I'm not sure if there's a way to dig into the wallet option to find out what the fee is before even sending. But I guess that's a question for the Electrum devs