This proposal assumes that Alice and Bob each have a clock, and that these clocks do not drift too much relative to each other. The channel may become unusable if clocks differ too much, as discussed below.

In order to resume the activity of a Lightning channel, one needs a backup that contains all the information about the current channel state. The need to perform channel backups has plagued user experience, with many implementations reverting to static backups, which can be used to recover funds, but not to resume channel operations.