Topic: BTC Lighting Network (Read 274 times)

RTL has 3 options to close:






Thunderhub has 2:






Lightning terminal makes you set the rate



There are more and they all AFAIK allow for some sort of control of the fee.
Some older versions may not, but any recent ones I have used have all had the ability to set the fee to what you want.

-Dave

NotATether and BlackHatCoiner, I once thought about the constraints of a dense Bitcoin transaction that could occur traffic jams so that the fee was higher.
I also know that transactions using a lightning network are cheaper, so if I don't try to try to learn transactions using a lightning network on electrum with testnet, I think it's a bad action.

Honestly, I still need to learn a lot about Electrum and everything available there because for me it is important for me in the future to make it easier for me when there are obstacles as we mean.
Thank You. I will always take good advice as an experience and learning.

My version of RTL allows me to set an exact fee rate for a channel close. I recently did this and entered 8 sats/vbyte for every channel but some of them ended up closing with 6 instead.

Electrum LN doesn't allow you to set the fees when closing the channel. It simply tells you that closing cooperatively usually results in lower fees, but this is just vague. What's a low fee when the median fee is like 100 sat/vb? If you choose to force-close the channel, then it's almost always more expensive. When signing commitment transactions, both partners select a very high fee for this exact reason (they don't know what the mempool's future holds).

I don't remember using a lightning software that allows to select a specific closing-channel fee. I have used Ride The Lightning, and I don't think there were even low/mid/high presets. Just a straight up "close the channel", which is pretty frustrating, because it's easy to just find an agreement on a particular fee rate when closing cooperatively.

LN software doesn't allow you to set fees with pinpoint accuracy (custom fee)? Just generic low/mid/high presets?

Try it in Electrum. And even better, in Electrum testnet. Enable lightning, restart Electrum, and it'll start running a node in the background. Open a channel with the suggested node, and buy yourself a coffee.

It's a worse experience in mainnet when there's mempool congestion.  

Everything is fun and games until one of the users wants to close their channel. Every single time that I've tried to do that, it selected more sat/vb than needed. And that's in different software, not just from a single.

Keep in mind that it will become more expensive to create the funding transactions to open channels when fees become higher, so you are best served by opening all the channels you want to open now, before there is another wave of transactions which balloon the mempool. Batching the transactions isn't going to help here because usually you can't know in advance how many channels you should have open for optimal routing and liquidity management.

The same goes for closing channels as there is an on-chain fee for that too. In general, this kind of period is like a hibernation time for the Lightning Network channel graph.

Technically, I don't know how to use the lightning network because I have never made a transaction using the lightning network as long as I know Bitcoin, but the Binance exchange has a transaction feature using the lightning network.
So far, I have only used transactions as usual, like normal transactions from the bech32 address, because when I calculated the fees, they were not high.


There must be a small error that I don't know about so you fail. What kind of small error made it fail, I don't know either. It's better if you use Electrum to carry out Lightning Network transactions, try discussing this problem on the special Electrum board.

I'm sure there are experts in this field who will help.

It would be better if you can show a "demo" and tell the exact steps that you did so we can help you with it or a least tell you what went wrong.

But I'd suggest you to create your own topic in the proper board.
For Electrum (same as the OP), go to ...Wallet software->Electrum and click "new topic" at the right-hand side of the screen.

I have tried lightning to do this and was not successful

It would be cheaper if you simply sent the bitcoin amount on-chain.  Lightning network is useful for micro-transactions, for instance if you wanted to transfer from your wallet to Binance once a week, or to do DCA once every few days.

I have used Electrum lightning and I would not recommend it, to be honest...


It is not!  That is why we call it off-chain.  

The balance updates happening within the lightning channel aren't visible on blockchain explorers. However, the transaction that opens an LN channel is a real on-chain transaction. So is the one that closes an LN channel. These two transactions are recorded on the blockchain, the rest isn't.

Before doing bitcoin lightning transactions, you should know why you want to use the lightning network. The lightning network only saves the fee if you want to do a lot of small (maybe recurring) transactions and if you do it on-chain, it won't be cost effective. However if the purpose is to move the funds once from one wallet to another, there is no advantage of using a lightning network as you will still incur the same transaction fee as if you were doing it on-chain.


No, it is not shown on the blockchain because you create a channel in a lighting network transaction and that is not shown on any blockchain explorers.

@PepeTalk
My guess is that you want to use the Lightning Network to save fees that you would otherwise pay for transactions on-chain. Am I right? That makes sense, but only if you already have an open channel and enough liquidity. In your case, you don't. You are going to have to open a channel first. That requires making a real on-chain bitcoin transaction.

For a one-time use, you are not going to save money that way.
If you deposit your coins to Binance on-chain, you would only make that one transaction and the coins are there.
If you open an LN channel, you have already made an on-chain transaction but your coins are not yet on Binance. Only after sending them through the LN channel will they reach their destination.

Finally, you will need to pay on-chain fees to close your channel. But that's cheaper than the BTC withdrawal fees on Binance.

Yes, Lightning Transactions "could" be cheap, almost as cheap as 0 to some satoshi depending on the route.

However, to send or receive through lightning in Electrum, you'll need a "Channel",
And that's where the 0.002BTC will be... let's say "transferred", you basically put your on-chain funds to your lightning funds in a form of a channel.
Under the hood, your 0.002BTC is sent (on-chain) to a MultiSig output that you and the remote node control but in a way that either can spend if the other party cheats or unreachable.
Refer to "Mastering Lightning Network" book for more info.

That established channel can't only be used to make "a lightning transaction" but every lightning transaction (to anyone) that you'll make as long as there's enough fund and route.
So this may only need to be done once.

But a slight correction to "minimal transaction fee", I said "could" because there are scenarios when the destination and the source had to take "a lot" of routes to send the intended amount.
Those payment channels that's used to route the transaction, although charge relatively small fee could pile into something expensive if a lot of them are used to route the transaction.
AFAIK, there's someone reported something similar in this board where I replied a workaround.

If you fund a channel, you are still the owner of your bitcoin but just that the transaction fee will be deducted for opening a channel and also which will be deducted if your want to close the channel. The fee is the onchain fee pay to miners as usual for transaction. Lightning network is cheap because you can fund a channel with higher amount and spend it in little quantities that is not advisable onchain. Example is using it to spend daily in a coffee shop and for buying goods that are not expensive.

If you use it on exchanges like Binance, you do not need to open any channel. You can also use wallet that has their own channels like Muun wallet which you will not need to to open any channel. Lightning network is very cheap. If you run your own lightning node, the fee is zero for who you connected your node to directly.

Everything has been accurately answered by nc50lc and I can not add to it. Read what he posted again.

I myself have not done any Bitcoin lighting transactions but i heard that it is very fast with very minimal transaction fee. However here you are saying that 0.002 BTC to fund the channel, so it is an expense for doing a lighting transaction and if so, then how come it is cheap


I think OP is asking if the transactions done over the Lighting network can be tracked by the third person on the blockchain. Even though the sender and the receiver (Binance in this case) know about the transaction but the outsider cannot trace it.

You misquoted this part.

---

Now that we're at it,
@PepeTalk as for that question, Lightning network doesn't have a blockchain and the transactions are done off-chain in the Lightning Network.
Means that your lightning transactions wont appear in Blockexplorers.
But as _act_ said, Binance knows that you've withdrawn Bitcoins through lightning and if you've opened the channel with their node,
they can directly know your transactions and the on-chain "close channel" transaction once you closed the channel.

You can send through lightning network on Binance.

Very small amount of money. The fee can change but it is $0.06815405 right now. The fee is always very small all the time.

If it is on noncustodial wallet and having your own lightning channel, it is anonymous. But you want to have the transaction on Binance which is centralized and makes it not anonymous.

It's been a while since I've used Binance but last time I checked there's a lightning deposit/withdraw option.
Electrum supports lightning as well so if you can confirm that Binance still has lightning options, then, yes it's possible.

Here are the basic steps: Firstly, enable lightning in "Wallet->Information"; Secondly, open a channel which requires about 0.002BTC onchain BTC to fund that channel.
(may be higher depending on the remote node)
Lastly, wait for confirmations until the channel status turns to "open".
After that, your 'Receive' tab will now have the option to create lightning invoice by toggling the "Address/URI/Lighting" button at the right. (desktop Electrum)
And Pasting a lightning invoice in the send tab will automatically send using your channels.

The setback here is "how".
Electrum's lightning isn't custodial so you'll have to manage your channels yourself, that includes its spending and receiving capacity.
And a newly opened channel (by you) wont contain any receiving capacity so you'll have to use your sending capacity first
by sending to Binance or other lightning wallets first to gain as much receiving capacity (minus reserve).
You can check the capacity: "can send/receive" in the 'Channels' tab.

With that, it'll never gonna work if it's just "send from - send to" since the difference in the amounts will be a problem to either receiving and sending capacity.
So, you may have to use a "swap/reverse swap" service to gain enough receiving capacity,
of course swap only the right amount that wont drain your sending capacity.