it doesn't seem very cost effective if we need to pay onchain fees, no?
It's effective compared to the existing alternative of having both a closing transaction and another channel open. It's also more convenient than creating a new channel with your channel partner since more channels add complexity. It also offers a better UX since, from what I understand, payments can still be made while waiting for the resize to occur on chain
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all good points, but rebalancing would still be cheapest if you're just looking to inject more liquidity to an existing channel
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Rebalancing is pretty costly in my experience and also covers a different use-case than wanting to resize a channel. Resizing a channel allows me to maintain the balance I have with my channel partner while potentially adding new funds to send them. I could have a .5 btc channel and want to make 1 btc payments. Adding 1 btc to my channel is the only way to make that possible while still having capacity for regular payments as well. I personally think it's a huge improvement to what we had before
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yes in that instance its very useful. Perhaps with channel factories we can lower the onchain costs further. Rebalancing can be done for zero cost, it's usually one of the first steps after forming a liquidity swap over at lightning.plus
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