You are completely right. You have to urge somebody to open a channel to you in order to receive funds in the first place.
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done !
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Completely wrong, actually. Bi-directional channels. That means you can open a channel with 1 node, and receive payments with anyone else that's indirectly connected to that node.
Thank you for your response. I thought if 1ML doesn't fund the channel in the first place, the channel would stay a one-way one.
The Lightning Network consists only of
bi-directional payment channels. The problem with receiving payments is that you can't receive if there is not enough space in your channel. Also, currently, only one party can fund a channel. Dual-funded channels are not available, yet.
Ok, so there is indeed a problem for receiving a payment for now, but it will be resolved with the use of dual-funded channels ?
No, you misunderstood.
The only issue is that some nodes (probably most of them still) have a max channel size (0.16777 BTC). But there's an option to ignore that limit too, as long as both nodes agree as a part of opening the channel to begin with.
Dual funding just allows a channel to be more balanced when it opens, nothing at all to do with receiving payments.
I do not agree:
Yes the channels are
bi-directional but when you open a channel its filled up from your side at first.
If you want to receive btc through that channel you have to spent it first so that it can be filled again from the other side.
As far as I see there is some discussion to extend the protocol for
dual-funded channels but i do not see a way to achieve that today.
You can open a channel with funds on the other side with LND using the option -push-amt:
The channel will be initialized with local-amt satoshis local and push-amt
satoshis for the remote node. Note that specifying push-amt means you give that
amount to the remote node as part of the channel opening.
But in that case you fill the other side with btc from your own.