In this article, Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja say that they believe the lightning-network-fees would be less than 1 satoshi per node you transmit through, in practice.
As far as I understand, you need to put two transactions on the blockchain in order to set up a single payment channel (one for opening and one for closing it), you need atleast two payment-channels to route a payment. That's four writes to the blockchain in total.
According to, this and this page, you need somewhere atleast 300 satoshis per byte or 76k satoshis per standard transaction, we all expect this to rise with increased adoption. That means that for running a node you need to make atleast 76*4=304k transactions just to break even.
I have seen suggestions that you might want to close your paymentchannels atleast once per month, I feel that 304k transactions per month in every single node is very much if we believe lightning network will be very distributed. However, I believe the Joseph and Tadge are smarter and more knowledgable than me, so what am I missing here?