309 sats \ 15 replies \ @jimblogic 9 Aug 2022 \ on: Daily discussion thread
I run a Lightning node, it went offline while I was away for 24h. "Lost" 20.000.000 sats of inbound liquidity ( 4 channels closed on me)
AMA so I can vent.
That's crazy. Shouldn't the channels close with your inbound liquidity going back to you onchain? You lost 20m in onchain transaction costs, right?
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"Inbound liquidity is the amount of bitcoin that the user is able to receive over a lightning channel. Outbound liquidity is the amount of bitcoin that the user is able to send over a lightning channel. Receiving bitcoin decreases the user’s inbound liquidity and increases their outbound liquidity."
I can only spend what is outbound and get paid from the inbound.
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Sorry, brain hickup, I confused the two.
You didn't loose money besides the transaction fees of the onchain transaction of the channel close. Right?
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Outbound is the sats I allocate (mine) for others to use for a fee. And if a channel closes with outbound of mine i get it all back.
Inbound is the sats that someone allocated (theirs) for me to use for a fee. I said on the post "lost" because it made my lightning node lose capacity and ranking making it less attractive for others to use or join
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What's your plan to build back the inbound liquidity?
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Most of the outbound liquidity that I can afford is already allocated. A lot of the inbound I had was because I reached out and asked if they would also open a channel to me for the same amount I was opening to them.
Funds move around drastically with my 0 base fees and 2 ppm, somehow even if 2/4 of the channels that were closed down I had originally opened, 95% of the liquidity was on their side at the time, so the software closed them down to avoid issues with HTLC im guessing u.u
Short answer: not much I can do atm, i have good channels with Wallet of Satoshi and Zero Base Fees, so hopefully organically i will get some channels connecting to me.
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cant you just reconnect to those channels again?
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These channels had most of the satoshis on their side when their software must have closed the channels to me. I reached out to some of them that i know but they seem to preffer to allocate those sats on another channel atm.
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Does that mean you could permanently lose the 20 million sats? That sounds too risky if I simply go offline by accident for a day.
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No, those 20 million sats were other people's sats, they had either opened a channel to me and had sats on their side of the channel or after a while some of my channels had liquidity moved around and it allocated sats on their side because my sats had gone to on another channel.
But even if they were other people's sats they were useful to me.
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Thanks. Provided your node doesn't get compromised, are the only ways to lose sats are fees from rebalancing?
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If you go offline for 2-3 days. There is a chance that a peer you have a channel with could potentially try to share an old state of the channel that benefits him/her with more sats on his/her side than there really have. If your node doesn't go back
online in time to provide a channel state that is more recent then they could get away with some funds. But you can set up a thing called a watchtower to automatically store channel states for you and send them for you if you are offline and a peer tries close a channel with you with erroneous info.
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Has this put you off continuing to run a lightning node in the future?
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Still running 11 channels, I've had like 6-7 channels closing on me this month because of issues with HTLC on their side most of the time. Onchain fees add up unfortunately. But I do this in a enthusiast manner. I have my Base Fees set to 0 and ppm to like 1-2 ( I would set it to 0 but I need to set some sort of friction to avoid channels getting extremely unbalanced which they already seem to do pretty quickly lol)
Hope that software improvements happen soon to avoid errors closing channels tbh.
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