Topic: [lightning] giving access to my lightning node to friends and family (Read 144 times)

thanks everyone for jumping in and sharing your thoughts

i agree with you, that lightning atm is not that user friendly, although i think it is getting better. and that is what i think will happen in the future with lightning even more. email was also a mess in the beginning, but you got used to it and the apps/software got better/more user friendly

alright, this sounds interesting and i see now, that opening channels to every family member or friend is probably not the best solution (see your comment about the liquidity)

yes, i meant that the channel doesn't get closed for some weird reasons, only when both or one side wants to close it, but i think that is already the case and some closes happen sometimes for some technical bugs or when there is no unanimity with closing fees for example (still figuring this out)

thanks for bringing lnbits up - it also works for c-lightning. will dig into this too

Technically, it is possible, but you have to force that on all of your nodes (and it wouldn't work for other LN nodes). You can always deposit some coins to some 2-of-2 multisig address and never generate channel closing transaction. But, the consequences are, that nobody will be able to touch that coins alone, then both parties have to be online and agree on channel closing to do that. In case of peers that don't trust each other it is unacceptable, but if you really want that feature, you can technically get it, if you want to disable uncooperative channel close.

Maybe LNbits https://lnbits.org/ Not sure what exactly it does, also never used it, but it claims to be an accounting system.

LNDHub would allow your family members to use your node's channels for all of their transactions. They wouldn't need to open any channels. Instead, they would need to deposit coins to an address generated by your node. Then, they would be able to spend exactly the amount they deposited. They could also receive coins without depositing anything.


I don't think that there is a better solution for c-lightning. The biggest disadvantage is that they would be limited by the liquidity in the channel between you and them. Setting the fee to zero for those channels won't affect outgoing payments.


In such cases, channel becomes inactive. Closing means settling the balance on-chain. It wouldn't make much sense to close the channel only because the other party went offline for a short period of time. Still, it is not possible to create a channel that cannot be closed.

That's fair, but it's more likely some of them will have understanding problems about bitcoin/LN that's make the project harder.

The thing about email servers is that end-users don't have to worry about how a mail server works, how to use a mail client software because email is dead simple with several well-known clients like Outlook, the mail apps on your phone, and SaaS like Gmail and Yahoo. And there are only a few fields that have to be known beforehand (subject, To, From, Body, the Spam folder etc etc), nobody has to read a manual or documentation to figure out how to send email 

Whereas in the case of lightning networks, not only do you have to explain LN channels to your friends and family, you also have to teach them how bitcoin addresses work, how transactions work, and find a way for them to offramp bitcoin to fiat currency and vice versa (without invasive KYC exchanges).


That's impossible, channels inevitably get closed when the other party becomes unreachable, like in the case of the client crashing or the system rebooting. Why do you need non-closable channels anyway?

since some days/weeks now i am diving into the lightning network. i opened my first channel with rath (we did it with the experimental dual-funding option in c-lightning, which worked flawlessly), consuming a lot of information around the topic, it feels like falling down the rabbit hole once again (after falling down the bitcoin rabbit hole). i am running a mailserver for my family and friends since some years now and would like to provide the same in the future with my bitcoin lightning node (a mostly independent way to transfer value). i assume that most people won't run a lightning node, you may see the parallel to running your own mailserver, most people don't and they use microsoft or google for that

today i had this idea how i could give access to friends and family to my node. what if they install the latest new shiny lightning app on their smartphones (with the ability to open channels - not acinq/bluewallet and the others) and then open private channels to my node. that would mean they can profit from my "position" in the network, but don't need to be online. then setting the fees for the private channels to zero (or one could charge for the service, by setting fees on these private channels). maybe this is what acinq is doing or bluewallet with their lndhub?

some things i am thinking about:

1. how can i make sure that these channels never get closed? is there something to "lock" channels, something like: never close this
2. maybe there is a better solution, cause with this setup, every person would still need to do one transaction on the base layer (which isn't that bad - i don't have that many friends and family members anyway  )
3. is this even something that i need to solve or is there a solution in front of my nose i didn't think about?

what are your thoughts? this is just something that came up today and i wanted to share it, maybe it is stupid, i am happy to discuss it  keep in mind i am running c-lightning, lndhub is for lnd only i think, that is why i didn't look deeper into it - but maybe i can take some concepts form them