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.

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.

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

We don't have any channel open. I mean, me and Friend B. (My only channel open now is with Friend A).

Do you know what is the setting I should use to set the dust limit to 573 sats?

Well, the output of that is:



But in the meantime, I was talking to (what I think is) a dev and he told me this is actually a bug and he started an issue on github.
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/issues/4140

In less than a week, I have already stumbled into 2 bugs. On one hand, this is bad, because a noob user and a new lightning user is coming across with quite a few bugs. On the other hand, it's good because I'm kind of contributing for the enhancement of this Lightning Network implementation.

This dev tried to push me to fix the bug, as it's apparently simple to fix, but I'm too afraid of messing things up, so I'm not going to do anything without supervision.

As far as I understood, every node in the Lightning Network has these 2 settings: channel reserve and dust limit. This said, when one node (A) tries to open a channel to another node (B), node (A) needs to make sure tat it's own channel reserve parameter is equal or greater than its own dust limit. Moreover, it also needs to make sure that its own channel reserve parameter is greater or equal to node (B) dust limit parameter.

I'm not sure about this because in the meantime, this dev stopped talking to me. He's probably afaik and where I live is now time to go to bed. If I can find this dev tomorrow again, I my try to discuss with him, the fix I have in mind, in case my assumption above is true and accurate!

Haha. That makes me wish that Bitfinex was a "model-exchange" that the other exchanges could follow. To be honest, I was expecting Bitstamp to be the first Lightning-capable exchange.

Hello.

There are 2 questions I still couldn't get a 100% accurate answer to. It's about opening channels, outbound and inbound liquidity/capacity.

First of all, is the term liquiddity the same as capacity?

And the 2 questions are:

1 - Do I get inbound capacity/liquidity when someone simply opens a channel with me?
2 - If [1] answer is no, do I MUST send some sats to the one who opened this channel with me to be able to have inbound capacity/liquidity???

And an extra question is if this work exactly the same way for outbound capacity. If so, the above 2 questions also answer to the case of outbound capacity/liquidity.

I have someone that opened a channel of 100k sats with me (his reserve is 1k sats) but he didn't send any sats to me neither I did to him and I can't send sats from my wallet in my phone into the wallet I have on my laptop connected to my node. The error is always the same: "Does the destination has inbound capacity??"...

Thanks

You can use them interchangeably in this context (inbound/outbound liquidity/capacity).


Yes, but it's also more complicated. See the last answer.


You get outbound capacity when: 1) you open a channel with someone 2) someone opens a channel to you and sends you some coins or routes a payment through you.


While your channel has some inbound capacity now, all incoming payments have to go through the node which opened the channel to you. You are also limited by the liquidity of other nodes in the route.

Correct. That would be the maximum you could receive through that channel.


There could be no route at all between your nodes or some node in the path might suddenly stop responding or the payment could be too large for a single channel to handle. The last one can be mitigated using multipart payments, but most wallets don't support them.


Yes, it does. Most of my Lightning payments were instant while others took under 10-15 seconds. Some payments took even longer time, but it didn't happen too often.