Source
r/lightningnetwork•
TopQualityWater

Forced closed a Channel and lost my funds.

Edit: This has been cleared up, false alarm everybody.

I’m sure this has been posted a million times but hopefully someone can point me to some answers..

I force closed a channel on eclair after a month of the other node being offline; and me being an average joe, I foolishly put 0.005 BTC in it back when BTC was 3800. It was roughly a 20 dollar input and I wanted it back as it has obviously appreciated in value.

Well, I just found out I received 0.00028 out of my 0.005 BTC initially invested.

Excuse me, but what the hell !

What happened to the rest of it?

Is there any way I can troubleshoot this or is my investment lost?

I am a little bothered by this because it’s not the only channel I want to close, and I don’t want to lose the investment.

Posted May 29, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC · edited

37
Subfolded•

Looks like it was already answered, but another thing that could potentially happen in cases like this is that you put X BTC into a new channel, but you already have other channels. Over time due to routing transactions, some of your funds are pushed to the remote side of your channel in question, but the same amount (ignoring fees) are pushed to your side among your other nodes. Although it's a wash overall for your node, when you later go to close that one channel in question, you could potentially find that it has much less of YOUR money in it than you put in. In reality, all that "missing money" is just distributed among your other channels.

2
technifocal•

Transaction ID?

I'm going to guess these were the fees related to a unilateral close (though I will admit they are extremely high). These fees are there to make sure the other party isn't able to close a competing state faster than you. If you close a channel with an online, cooperating node then the fees are agreed upon by both nodes (lncli closechannel --sat_per_byte, or whatever your implementation's alternative is).

In the future, there will be ways to mitigate this, such as the one I described here (though, don't take my word for it that this will work, as I'm not 100% sure).

However, alpha software is alpha software and this is one of the sharp edges that currently exists.

1
TopQualityWaterOP•

This sharp edge probably shouldn't exist though.. I put in those satoshis to help a node, and now when I want it back, I get practically nothing..

I hate to whine but honestly its pretty ridiculous to release a product that doesn't really work.

Unless of course i am missing something obvious, in which case I'll apologize for my stupidity, but otherwise... yeah you get the point.

Edit: Yeah, I was missing something.

ID: 90daae195cb4d1dbbe986fab51a128bba9f14b59325fbeac8ac24d17c35a9e9c

3
technifocal•

All transaction values GBP as of right now, not when they occurred.

On 2019-01-19 you put in 0.0005BTC (£3.45), paid a 0.00002903BTC fee (£0.20). This put 0.00047097BTC (£3.25) into your channel.

On 2019-05-29 you took out 0.00047097BTC (£3.25), paid a 0.00018153BTC (£1.25) fee resulting in 0.00028944BTC (£1.99).

Here it is as a table:

Transaction descriptionIn (BTC)In (GBP)Fee (BTC)Fee (GBP)Out (BTC)Out (GBP)
You -> Channel0.0005£3.450.00002903£0.200.00047097£3.25
Channel -> You0.00047097£3.250.00018153£1.250.00028944£1.99

The fee to open the channel was completely reasonable (21.2 sat/vbyte) and the fee to close it was within reason for a unilateral close 164.7 sat/vbyte.

What part of this transaction do you think was unreasonable? For reference, these fees are pretty much static no matter the value of the channel, had it been 1,000,000 BTC or 0.00000001 BTC, the fees would have been the same. So, while the percentage might have been high for your specific case, unfortunately on-chain transactions are expensive.

8
TopQualityWaterOP•

Oh my gosh, Im a freakin idiot!

You are right, I have other channels open that do infact have 0.005 BTC in them; Somehow I misread this one particular channel as having 0.005 as-well when it actually had 0.0005....

I have no idea how I was so clueless, but thank you; you cleared it right up!

I'm just a dumbass lol!

5
technifocal•

Glad it wasn't a bug in any software 😅

3
Caltosax•

Your post has the potential to scare people away from using lightning if they don't read all the comments. Maybe you could add a quick edit to say it was a false alarm?

2