<p>Lightning nodes do not need to advertise an external IP address. This does prevent other nodes from connecting to you, but you can still connect to other nodes (as long as they have a public address) and open channels to them. Other nodes will not be able to open a channel to you unless you're already connected to them.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-02-08T17:08:56.580Z
1. So how are gossip messages propagated to these non-ip nodes? and 2. What about connections that need to be formed if the node in question is the recipient of a transaction? 3. Does this apply to LN nodes running on TOR too?
Vinay Shetty
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-02-09T09:21:59.007Z
Update: So when a node connects to a node in the LN network, is a peer-to-peer connection, and all communication happens on this connection. With communication, on the connection I mean, channel creation, channel updates, and all the gossip messages. Basically, this connection is persistent until the node goes offline. Is my understanding correct?
Vinay Shetty
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-04T21:09:38.237Z
@VinayShetty: The nodes to have an ip-address but just don't list it publicly. These nodes can create connections to their peers and get gossip + information about receiving transactions from them.
Erik
CC BY-SA 4.0
2022-02-08T15:48:47.780Z
2022-02-08T15:48:47.780Z
Vojtěch Strnad
<p>I'm trying to create a graph of the LN network using data from <a href="https://ln.fiatjaf.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ln.fiatjaf.com/</a>.
I used the channel data to get all the active channels for any given duration and created a graph using the nodes of the said channels.
The next step was to find the largest connected component that yielded 20k LN nodes. Of 20k LN nodes, a good portion (~5k nodes) do not have an address field. This data was queried using <a href="https://1ml.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://1ml.com/</a>.
I was just trying to find if there is any reason behind it, because based on my understanding if a node is part of a fully connected component, it should have one of IPv4, IPv6, or an onion address.</p>

<lightning-network><ln-topology>
LN nodes with no network addresses
Vinay Shetty
# LN nodes with no network addresses

(Asked by: username_0 on 2022-02-08)

I'm trying to create a graph of the LN network using data from <https://ln.fiatjaf.com/>.
I used the channel data to get all the active channels for any given duration and created a graph using the nodes of the said channels.
The next step was to find the largest connected component that yielded 20k LN nodes. Of 20k LN nodes, a good portion (~5k nodes) do not have an address field. This data was queried using <https://1ml.com/>.
I was just trying to find if there is any reason behind it, because based on my understanding if a node is part of a fully connected component, it should have one of IPv4, IPv6, or an onion address.

**Tags:** lightning-network, ln-topology


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2022-02-08. Score: 1

Lightning nodes do not need to advertise an external IP address. This does prevent other nodes from connecting to you, but you can still connect to other nodes (as long as they have a public address) and open channels to them. Other nodes will not be able to open a channel to you unless you're already connected to them.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: 1. So how are gossip messages propagated to these non-ip nodes? and 2. What about connections that need to be formed if the node in question is the recipient of a transaction? 3. Does this apply to LN nodes running on TOR too?  
> **username_0**: Update: So when a node connects to a node in the LN network, is a peer-to-peer connection, and all communication happens on this connection. With communication, on the connection I mean, channel creation, channel updates, and all the gossip messages. Basically, this connection is persistent until the node goes offline. Is my understanding correct?  
> **username_2**: @username_0: The nodes to have an ip-address but just don't list it publicly. These nodes can create connections to their peers and get gossip + information about receiving transactions from them.  

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