Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 57. (Read 33677 times)

Ok, a small update.
My Friend B ended up closing the channel I opened with him and then, some time later (hours later) he tried to open a channel with me of about 30k sats but he got this message:



I've been talking to @Rath_ and he told me I probably have to add some setting to my node to overcome this problem. But he can't help me further now because he's not where he can help me. However he told me I should search something about "dust limit".

Anyone have an idea of what should I be adding to my c-lightning node config file?


Thanks

It appears that Bitfinex already allow their clients to make LN deposits to their accounts. Quite a big development really, it perhaps got mixed up with the news that Bitfinex were running a public LN node? I'm not sure when client account deposits went live tbh

Yes, the exchanges. Onboarding exchanges must be one of the first priorities.


I believe it will be obviously clear.


Or Lightning Labs, Blockstream, or another VC-backed company that develops Lightning could hire a person specializing in business development.


I believe not. It also needs a better UX, needs more exchanges/services providing liquidity for easy routing, and needs their users to become Lightning users.

Regarding the darkv0rt3x's case - it turned out that he had only an outbound channel to friend B. That channel required both sides to have a 546 satoshi reserve which means that he should have been able to receive about 454 satoshi through that channel since he had sent a 1000 sat payment through friend B. He tried to receive as little as 50 satoshi without success. It seems to be a problem with friend's B node. Any other suggestions are welcome.

What I am describing should not add add vulnerabilities, as the amount available for outbound transactions is public information. You should be able to look at an error message, and other information, and be able to determine what the underlying problem that is preventing a transaction from going through. I don't think the technical expertise required to implement what I describe is higher than what an exchange should have. Exchanges and other businesses should have engineers that could implement what I describe; if they don't, there is a risk, even probability that other vulnerabilities will exist and will be exploited.

Sure, no problem. Just keep the sensitive information closed please. I'll ask permission to my friend to share our channel info too!


Edited;
Well, looks like there's not much to hide, after all. It's all at 1ml.com.

Sure, go ahead. Do you want me to let the other people here know what might be possibly wrong after I have checked it?

Can I send you a PM with my friend's node ID and channel ID?

I might be able to see the details of your friend's channels on the 1ml.com explorer once you provide me with your channel's id. I don't know if all information will be up-to-date. We can give it a go if you don't mind sharing it here.

If I show you the channel he opened with me, can you tell if all the conditions are met or not?

There is an unspendable channel reserve. You need to spend about 2-3% of the channel's capacity before you will be able to receive anything. Theoretically, you should be able to receive slightly less than 30k sats through friend's B second channel since all funds are on his side of the channel at the moment. There might be some problem with friend's B channels. He might not have enough inbound capacity because of the reserve.

Hello once more.

As I'm new to the Lightning network, I need some help to clear a few questions I have about opening channels and inbound capacity.

So, the scenario is this:

I have a c-lightning node running on my laptop and I have Spark-Wallet installed and connected to my node.
I have Bluewallet installed in my smartphone.
I have opened 2 channels with 2 friends of mine (friend A and friend B) of 20k sats (for the sake of experimenting)
Then I sent 100 sats to friend A.
After that I sent 1000 sats to my Bluewallet. I know this transaction was routed through friend B node.
Then friend B opened a channel with me with 30k sats.
Now I'm trying to send sats from my Bluewallet to my Spark-Wallet, but no matter the value I choose, I always get an error of inbound capacity not available!

Shouldn't I be able to receive up to 100 sats from friend A node and up to 1k sats through friend B node?

What am I missing and what is that reserved value I know it gets kinda locked when channels are opened?

Not necessarily, the Eclair wallet provides for buying inbound capacity.  I think the Zap wallet has a similar function.

If part of that purchase was (example) you paid for an inbound 0.05 channel and part of that 0.05 was sent to you (say 0.04) your cost might be (random numbers out of my head) say 10% on top of the 0.04 plus the TX fee to open the channel - rounded up to 0.005.  In the hypothetical example you might pay (in advance) 0.045 and get a 0.05 channel opened to you with 0.01 inbound plus 0.04 outbound capacity which would no doubt be a healthy start to any new node.

It's also a matter of perception of use.
I have no issues opening 2 very large channels to some providers and a bunch of smaller ones to other places. As I stated elsewhere I was actually using 1 node to connect to the big peers and the another to connect to the small ones and then connecting to the node with the smaller ones.

And as d5000 said you can manage fees by opening channels at certain times. But if I do keep a bunch of channels open AND fees stay high at some point I am going to empty the smaller channels and only deal with larger liquidity providers. That is going to be the issue.
Because, yeah I can say open this with 1 or 2 sat fee because I know it will open overnight on a weekend. But at some point who wants to plat that game.

-Dave

Yes, there is a thin ledge between "fees too high for LN" and "fees too low for LN".

However, the good thing is that opening a LN channel is not time-critical, so people can wait for it for moments with low fees. Let's say the fees for a instant confirmation rise to $50 at weekdays at daytime, but go down to $5-10 at night (western hemisphere). Then, observing the current mempool data*, at weekends it's likely that they go under $1 and cheap channels can be opened. And once LN adoption is boosted and many services using it, pressure on the on-chain fees should become lower.

But yes, I guess that if LN adoption depends only from fees, then it can fail, as fees could rise too fast and opening LN channels would be too expensive, like you wrote. So I guess there are additional efforts needed. Service providers, above all wallets and exchanges, should really realize that if they support LN now when fees are still low, they also contribute to a healthier and more sustainable Bitcoin ecosystem.

*For example, according to Johoe, in the week between October 5 and October 11, fees were relatively high, with instant-confirmation rising over 100 sat/byte in several occasions. However, even in this situation at the daily minimum (night in the western hemisphere) they could always be confirmed for 8 sat/byte or even lower, and at Sunday 11, 1 sat/byte again was enough. So there were 2 (decimal) orders of magnitude between the minimum instant-conf fees and the maximum instant-conf fees.

I'm afraid that's not going to happen. If fees reach 1000 sat/byte again, opening and closing a LN channel is going to cost $25 or (much) more. That won't be worth is, just like I couldn't use Bitcoin for normal transactions at the end of 2017.
Unless you can use an exchange to buy Lightning Bitcoin directly so they open large channels instead of having users open small channels, but that means you can only use custodial wallets.

For me, there are mainly two conditions for the Lightning Network to really take off:

1) Providers of massively used services must support it.
2) It must be clear that transaction costs using LN are much smaller than without it.

Condition 1 is a chicken-and-egg problem. If there are many users, there will be many services, and vice versa. Ideally, some service providers could create something like a "beta area", where people can use LN to deposit and withdraw coins at their own risk but keeping the wallets of on-chain and LN activity strictly separated to minimize exposure to threats related to the alpha/beta state of LN software. But as it was discussed some pages ago this will probably only happen on a small scale.

So it is possible that a LN "takeoff" is more likely to come from a new increase of transaction fees due to fuller blocks (condition 2). This would make it again attractive for service providers to jump on the LN boat.

Obviously usability is also a factor, and thus I consider the Electrum support for LN a major step forward, even if its still limited. It may have contributed to the new records set in September/October for LN capacity.

BTW: I was looking for a good, updated list of LN services. A list of lightning services/stores seem to be at Lightning Network Stores, but it is possible that it is outdated as all wallet providers are from 2018 or 2019. Is there a better list anywhere?

I admire the optimism, but I don't know how an ordinary user will be expected to be in it long term, unless he/she is incentivized from the level of specialization in maintaining a Lightning node. But I see a debate for altruism to boot-strap the network.

I can choose from many different wallets, pay a growing number of services and receive payments in seconds. LN is doing just fine.

You ask a lot of questions on topics you abandon afterwards. Why's that?

Would it be more mature from our community and from the developers of Lightning Network to state that it has failed? It's fine, not everything needs to be a success in this world. The 2% isn't happening.