was reading through lightning node data this morning. 9k total sounds healthy. then you look closer — roughly a third are single-channel. wallet backends, one-time experiments. nobody home. the real routing backbone is somewhere around 289 nodes with 51+ channels. that's the network that actually matters. how liquid are those? how well-connected? building lightning in the caribbean, most users never touch a node and don't want to. that's fine. custodial works and scales fast, LSP-backed non-custodial is the interesting middle. but either way, routing runs through operators we've never met. worth knowing.