Topic: Electrum Lightning Network walkthrough - page 4. (Read 4932 times)

Hello
To transfer an amount between my 2 wallets, if I understand correctly the lightniht network is the best way to minimize fees AND the fastest?

Here is my case
Wallet A ~1,4 mBTC (btc purchase made with CB)
Wallet B empty
I am with Electrum 4.1.2

The idea is to transfer the whole amount from wallet A to wallet B using lightning.
I am at the confirmation stage with a transaction fee of 0.0038 mBTC
1/ Is this correct?
2/ Is there a particular procedure to do this?
3/ What are the optimum settings to do this properly?

Sure. I will send you a private message in a moment.


Electrum might not have been the best choice for the first time, but you simply got extremely unlucky with the suggested peer. If you had opened a channel to a different node, I am quite sure that you would have had a much better experience. I would suggest you using either BlueWallet or Phoenix Wallet next time. I have been running an LND node for quite some time now and I haven't run into any major problems, but it's quite a bit more complicated than using Electrum.

If you decide to close the channel, I would appreciate if you could let us know here how much you ended up paying. I hope that the cooperative close will result in significantly lower fees.

well thank you for helping me out getting some clarity about the issue.
do you mind sharing the link to the other person with this issue?

the only reason i came to lightning is to save on fees and now i will have to pay a much higher amount than on any on-chain transaction
first and last time i'm using lightning.

That's very likely. As far as I remember, even if you select "Close channel" instead of "Force-close channel", you won't be able to specify your own transaction fee. I believe that a cooperative close (the first option) should use a much lower fee, but I am not that familiar with Electrum implementation of the Lightning Network so don't take my words for granted

I have just found a similar case to yours on the Internet. It looks like some other people had the same problem with this particular node.

Does this mean if i close the channel i will have to pay a ridiculous fee for the transaction? that would be about 42€ as of now.

It took me a while to figure out what could possibly be wrong.

Since I don't have any open channels in Electrum at the moment, I experimented a bit with my LND node. I have recently spent 0.00591658 BTC on a channel opening transaction. Right now, I can spend 578 053 satoshi through that channel and its reserve is 5916 satoshi. 578 053 + 5916 = 583 969 satoshi, so it turned out that I was also missing some coins. I found an additional parameter called "Commit Fee". This value tells how much money you are going to pay for the closing transaction fee if either you or the other party broadcasts the current commitment transaction (a transaction which records balances in the channel). In my case, it was equal to 13 605 satoshi. 578 053 + 13 605 = 591 658 satoshi. Great!

So, it looks like both you and the other party signed a commitment transaction with an unnecessarily high fee. I am not sure why that happened - transaction fees are extremely low at the moment. Theoretically, the commitment transaction fee should be updated once you send an off-chain payment, but I am afraid that the node you are connected to might still force you to sign another commitment transaction with a huge fee.

I don't remember if you can specify the closing fee manually if you close the channel cooperatively in Electrum. In my opinion, this would be the best option for now. I can help you choose a better node next time.

I have sent you a message with the Node ID.
If i close the channel, will i get the total capacity minus transaction fees back to my wallet?

edit: since i reached the limit for private messages, i'm replying here.

        "local_balance": 200000,
        "local_reserve": 2000,

would that not mean 1% is reserved and not 10% (198000 sat)? Its the same in your image. I dont see the correlation to the "can send" amount.

I'm using the latest 4.12 version. 3 restarts so far and no change.

It should show the correct value from the beginning. I don't think anything is going to change once you have sent a transaction. As you can see on my screenshot, I also opened a 0.002 BTC channel and I was able to send about 90% of the funds.

I suspect that this might be because of the node you are connected to. It sounds as if the required channel reserve was extraordinarily large. Would you mind sharing the id of your peer either here or via a private message? No one will be able to find your channel because Electrum creates private channels which are not advertised across the network.

its pretty much the same as your image from first post, except for the significantly lower "can send". Capacity is the minium amount with 0.002 btc. Remote Node ID from suggested peer.
I would like to not share an image due to privacy reasons.
Since i'm new to Lightning, does this mean the 42% is not usable in this state or does it change once i make a transaction?

That sounds weird. Can you share more details? What node did you connect to? How big is your channel? You can also share a screenshot of your channel details with blurred funding outpoint and channel id if you want to.

i just opened my fist lightning channel using this guide.
Does anyone know why the amount of "Can send" is only 58% of the Capacity of the channel?
Whats up with the other 42%? Can i not use them at all?

I have just updated the guide to reflect the changes made in the recent update. The biggest change is support for trampoline nodes which are now used by default. While it doesn't take much time to download the network graph right now, it is a significant improvement which will be more useful in the future. I also added a short FAQ section. If any questions come to your mind, don't hesitate to ask them and I will put them there.

A new update of Electrum was released two days ago. It has brought quite a few improvements to the Lightning implementation.


The changelog explains each new feature quite well, so there is no point in explaining it here again. I will try to update the guide to match the changes by the end of the week.

Also, submarine swaps are now available on Android devices.

Edit: It looks like multi-part payments are not explained in the changelog. Basically, any payment can be split into smaller chunks and sent through different channels. This can drastically decrease the failure rate of transactions as well as make some of them cheaper (see this post).

Now, that must be a pathing issue between your channel to the other Electrum wallet's channel, because not all of them are well-connected to the rest of the network or connected to a "super-node".
Try opening a channel to the same nodeID on both Electrums, after establishing channels, restart Electrum and wait for a few seconds 'till "95% +" connection to the lighting network.
Then try to send a new lightning transaction between the two Electrums.

Here's an example, sent from one testnet Electrum to another with channels connected to the same nodeID:


In real-world usage, pathing will be less troublesome because there are way more channels in the Bitcoin than Testnet.

Oh, alright. I successfully made a LN transaction with electrum. I do have some questions, though. First of all, on "Swap" it shows that this service is powered by Boltz backend. What does that mean? Is it centralized? Or the backend source files are brought by Boltz? (contribution)

Secondly, when I swap my funds to increase my receiving capacity, where do they go? I checked a block explorer and it showed me a transaction in which a multi-signature address spends an output to one my receiving (bech32) addresses. Also, why was it parent? Shouldn't it be just "Unconfirmed"?



For some reason it shows me the error below, while I have enough sending capacity:

Alternatively (aside from the reply above), you can send some testnet BTC here: https://starblocks.acinq.co/ and that should open up some reveiving capacity that you can see above the channels tab.
On the upper-left hand side, it says: Can send 0.00XX BTC; can receive 0.00XX BTC and it's self explanatory.

You need to open up some incoming capacity in one of the wallets.  On the "Channels" tab click on the swap button.  Send some (or all) of your lightning funds back to on-chain BTC.  That will open up some capacity for you to receive incoming lightning transactions in that wallet.

See my post here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5308304

I still don't understand, though, why I can't make a simple LN transaction with two different electrum wallets. I've tried it with the link you gave me (yalls.org), but it doesn't seem to be the same when I try to pay myself. Please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere:

On the first wallet I open a channel with a LN node depositing 5mTBTC. On the second wallet I open a channel with the same LN node depositing again, 5mTBTC. I generate a LN invoice from the first wallet and enter it on the address' input field of the second wallet. I enter 2mTBTC and I click "Pay". This is what I get:

I wanted you to try receiving a payment after making a few small purchases on Yalls since you should have gained incoming liquidity this way.


0.0015 mBTC is equal to 150 satoshis which is below the dust limit. If an output is below the dust limit then it is added to the transaction fee automatically.

Shouldn't this be just a default option? Not a hardcoded value. Same thing for the minimum amount of 2 mBTC.


The channel's capacity is 3 mBTC and it says that I can send 2.96416 mBTC. I sent 0.0015 mBTC on a testnet service (?) and it seems it worked:


Once I did, I closed the channel afterwards. Should I? This is the transaction that was broadcasted when I did: 46b6b2cc6570263a3a21a0ce20612d8952f5bd9a6ffa1914a14860c328270500

It's a multi-signature address sending 0.00299665 TBTC to one of my change addresses. Shouldn't there be an extra output with 0.0015 mBTC?