Balance In Limbo

General Discussions
1

Someone closed the channel couple weeks ago.
Now i see Balance In Limbo 14000.
What can I do for return my sats?

2

What is the output when you run the lncli pendingchannels command? (can be run directly from the command prompt in the Lightning Shell app)

If all the info on the close is under waiting_close_channel (cooperative close) then the transaction may have timed out if you have already waited for 2 weeks. If that is the case you’ll have to force close on your peer to get the sats. See https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/6453 for an issue I had with a timed-out cooperative close.

3

just tried to close, receive error
lncli closechannel --force 03a*****n
[lncli] rpc error: code = Unknown desc = max hash string length is 64 bytes

4

Syntax for force close is “lncli closechannel --force txid idx” Did you put the last parameter in the command?
If not, then try this:

  • Run an lncli listchannels (or look at the output of the pendingchannels you ran earlier).
  • Find the channel you want to close, and copy the “channel_point” value.
  • Replace the : with a space.
  • Insert the (edited) channel point value after the “lncli closechannel --force”
2 Likes
5

thank you, it works!

6

HI, i do have the same problem ( i think) . i see a pending close channel sitting for 3 days.

when i hit the closing transaction provided the mempool says. :
"### Transaction not found.

Waiting for it to appear in the mempool…"

which doesn’t sound good.

when i run lncli pendingchannels i can see imore details. it says :
"
{
“total_limbo_balance”: “3371798”,
“pending_open_channels”: [
],
“pending_closing_channels”: [
],
“pending_force_closing_channels”: [
],
“waiting_close_channels”: [
{
“channel”: {
“remote_node_pub”: “02…44”,
“channel_point”: “c4…:1”,
“capacity”: “3500000”,
“local_balance”: “3371798”,
“remote_balance”: “124443”,
“local_chan_reserve_sat”: “35000”,
“remote_chan_reserve_sat”: “35000”,
“initiator”: “INITIATOR_REMOTE”,
“commitment_type”: “ANCHORS”,
“num_forwarding_packages”: “1”,
“chan_status_flags”: “ChanStatusBorked|ChanStatusCommitBroadcasted|ChanStatusLocalCloseInitiator”,
“private”: false
},
“limbo_balance”: “3371798”,
“commitments”: {
“local_txid”: “XXX…”,
“remote_txid”: “ZZZ …”,
“remote_pending_txid”: “”,
“local_commit_fee_sat”: “3098”,
“remote_commit_fee_sat”: “3573”,
“remote_pending_commit_fee_sat”: “0”
},
“closing_txid”: “c4adce4953f6d4f4a1a8f5409cb546d0e405e82f191c6520e308d904e0ccbe07”
}
]
}

it is just “waiting close” ( it doesn’t seems to be a force close … ? ) initiated by remote ?
any reason ?

my local funds are in limbo ( 3+M …)
i see one solution is to force close it (also ? again?) using lncli force close ???

also time is defeanetly not good for force closes. it will cost the eyes. (could be other 150$ total fee looking at the ccurrent fees)
any other solution ?
if i wait what will happen ?

thanks for helping
JN

7

Your peer chose to close the channel but is only offering 11.1 sat/vB for the (cooperative) close. You can see the tx in mempool. If you don’t want to pay the high fee of force closing or wait for fees to come down then I think the only alternative is to convince your peer to bump up the tx fees - but that will cost them some sats. I am not sure what the risk of waiting would be other than the tx could time out, and then a force close would be the only option. In this situation I would try and contact my peer to find out their intentions.

8

HI, thanks a lot Orville. some more questions if i may , to improve my umbrel/lightning knowledge :slight_smile:

  • how do you dectect it is a cooperative closing ? ( multisig 2 of 2?)
  • how do you know that it was the peer that generated the closing ( couldn’t have been me with some automatic software behavior ? i am playing with charge-lnd these days, although it shouldn’t do it maybe something happened ? )
    because i asked him and he says he didn’t do anything and still sees the channel as green… ( strange no ? ( how come it is not pending also on its side ?)
  • the transaction is published , how can it time out (it is about 2 weeks right ?) ? the blockchain doesn’t care about time does it ? umbrel will do it on its own ?
9

Hm, yes - maybe that cannot be deducted 100% from the info. I just saw “pending_force_closing_channels”: [
] - and force closes usually begin fast and furiously with high fees.

Could be, yes.

I don’t know the exact mechanics of why or how this happens, but it happened to me once when I got too stingy with the fees.

I also don’t know the significance of "ChanStatusBorked|ChanStatusCommitBroadcasted|ChanStatusLocalCloseInitiator” but it looks like your peer recently, and at the same time as when they transacted the close with your node, had some issues with their node. Lots of force closes, but all of these force closes got bumped through by CPFP. Not this one though, and I wonder why?

10

Congratulations on the completed force close in 818290, which should eventually solve your issue with sats in limbo. It was most probably a force close all along, and not cooperative. Just took a little while before the CPFP was applied :slight_smile: