Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 70. (Read 33852 times)

Great thread!!

This post  ( or maybe more so the medium article ) would make for a nice addition to the OP IMO.  At the very least I’ve never seen LN explained so simply so I wanted to share here.. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.29271658 . 

Cheers

A forced channel closure occurs when one of the parties wants to close the channel without any negotiations. This is mostly used when the other party is offline. You misunderstood one thing. It doesn't happen automatically after 24 hours. You can be offline for months and nothing will happen as long as the other party doesn't close the channel while you are absent.

Most of the people who run LN nodes don't close offline channels forcefully the moment they go down. I used to wait a couple days before doing so. Once one of the parties decides to close the channel, you have (by default) 24 hours to come back online in order to check if the other person didn't broadcast old state of your channel. I don't think many people know how to exploit it intentionally.

I am not sure about other implemantations but LND allows you to set up a watchtower which checks if the channel is closing and if the other party didn't cheat. You can set it up on a cheap VPS, but you don't have to worry about it if you don't have much money locked up in the channel.

Note: The other party can't simply steal all of your money. You would have to push the coins to their side by for example buying something and then receive payment from someone through that channel. In the meantime, the other person would have to make a copy of the channel's state.

I followed the discussion for a few pages but couldn't find the question that came to my mind on seeing this. My ISP has these issues where the connection could be gone for more than 24 hrs. (In reality, the ADSL lines are lying exposed on the ground and the hand-twisted connection frequently gets sheared by passing cars, marauding kids and I'm not even joking). If i run an LN node and open a channel by putting some Sats and making a funding transaction, does the onus now lies on me to ensure that it is always online (or online atleast once in 24 hours)??

If for some reason, i happen to just leave house or the neighbor's kid decide to pull on the lines, would that mean forced channel closure leading me to pay on-chain fee unnecessarily?
Sorry if i have not googled for this. I'd like to read more about the challenges and roadmap of LN.

99% of the time it probably would not matter. I was doing an test of some stuff during the week [yeah I know use testnet for testing] and 3 places had opened MASSIVE channels to me. I thought / figured at the time it was a mistake. In the time I have been playing around with LN in TOTAL I have not sent & received in total as much as any one of those channels. And then an hour or 2 later they closed them.

I mentioned it to someone Friday who said, "yeah I had the same thing happen a week or 2 ago" he also mentioned that it did not appear on 1ml or other LN explorers. I did not check on mine. Just big open followed a bit later by a big close. So somebody is playing around with something. Which is fine but, I just did not expect it and was wondering if there was a way to prevent it.


That is probably what I am look for. Thanks.

-Dave

Pardon my ignorance guys, But any of you heard about this so called: LSATs: Pseudonymous Authentication using Bitcoin Lightning Payments? What's your thoughts about this one? Good idea or what?

https://medium.com/tierion/lsats-pseudonymous-authentication-using-bitcoin-lightning-payments-459e209b4b36

Hi Dave,

Why not ? A channel opening to you does not require anything from your side (apart few bytes of RAM but....), people usually strive to have big inbound channels.

FWIW that's again somehing that can be done with C-lightning plugins, it's called the `openchannel` hook.

But a channel opening to you doesnt eat your sending capacity ?.. It just increases your receiving capacity (and potentially the number of routes we can reach you through).

If someone opens a channel that eats up your entire node's sending capacity, shouldn't that be handled by routing fees? Those should be high enough to pay for rebalancing your channels.

Well that is annoying. I can't believe that nobody thought someone might not want to have some unknown node open a massive channel to them.
Seems to be something that should be looked at. Unless I am missing something it does seem to open up the possibility of abuse.

-Dave

As far as I know, the answer is no. You can only change the minimum size of any incoming channel in the config file (minchansize). It applies to every node; you can't whitelist them.