Breez Wallet on Iphone – Issue with channel unexpectedly closing
I was wondering whether to open a new thread or just post my issue here.
About 24 hours ago (from this post), I opened up my Breez wallet, and it said that my channel was closing. It was like my opening up of the Breez wallet caused my channel to close, because it was pending closing, and then after about 45 minutes, the channel was closed. Another weird thing is that after the channel closed, the date of the closing shows as October 19, 2023 (which would be about 6 weeks ago.. which surely is strange because I know that I had been opening up the app about once a week or so, just to look at the balance).
While the close was pending, the message said something about the funds getting credited back to a bitcoin wallet address, and I was a little worried because the balance in the account (channel) was close to 2 million sats.
When the close was pending, I was looking around to try to figure out to where the balance was going to be credited, and I figured out that I had funded the channel from two different sources:
1) two transactions from a blue wallet lightning wallet
and
2) a relative had sent me a transaction from another Breez account
I do believe that Breez does explain the channel closing question on their website, but I did not find that page until writing this post.
https://doc.breez.technology/Closed-Channel.htmlEssentially, the Breez site provides a few reasons that channels might be closed:
1) a peer force-closes
2) nodes hold funds rather than forwarding them
3) inactivity of 45 days or more without executing any LN transaction
4) bugs in lnd - causing inadvertent closings
I should have taken some screen shots of the various screens that I saw on my phone while I was going through this process, but I did not, but it still seems that a description of these kinds of potential issues is mostly addressed by Breez, even though I still do not know why my channel was closed – even though surely I was not using my Breez wallet on a regular basis. I think that my last transaction prior to the closing of the channel was around 6 months earlier (so that would surely be greater than 45 days of inactivity).
My initial thoughts were that the refund would end up going back to the address from which they originated, but that did not make a whole lot of sense, and so I was confused about where the funds were to go until once the channel close was complete, a caution triangle icon showed up on the right upper screen of the app. This part is also contrary to what their website says about the funds being available after 144 blocks (so around 24 hours).
When I clicked on the icon, it showed me that the transaction had refunded to a new bitcoin address that was under my control and they had subtracted about 34,425 sats in the channel closing process. The message stated that I needed to transfer the funds out of that address as soon as possible, so when I transferred the funds to another address, it gave me three options between priority, normal and economical, and I choose economical which cost me an additional 7,820 sats to send. My total costs for this forced channel closing seems to be around 42,245 sats ($18.55) – which does not seem to be inexpensive.
Before, my funds ended up showing up, I had been considering contacting Breez, but when I went to their homepage, it showed that I needed to enter my personal information, which did not seem like a good idea..
Anyone have any ideas regarding what happened here? Previously, I had seen warnings that if the app was not running on the phone (presumptively in the background) then the channel could be closed, and I have no reason to believe that my Breez app had not been running in the background, like I mentioned I tended to open the app about once a week, and then why is it showing October 19th as the closing date when it appeared to have had closed on December 7th? Anyone? Anyone?