I have recently set up my lightning node and got it to sync with LNDHub and connect to my mobile blue wallet lightning wallet. The problem I’m having is that when I spend sats, they are deducted from both my balance on my umbrel node as well as the balance in my mobile wallet. Am I being double charged? The sats I added to my blue wallet are not reflected in the total on my umbrel lightning node, but both are deducted from when making a purchase.
Hmm, do you want to share a screenshot?
I’m assuming what’s happening is when you spend it eats away at one side of the liquidity of your channel - your Max send and Max receive channel capacity is eaten up one way or another depending on if you’re sending sats - so if you’re making a spend you’ll see your Max Send goes down and your channel is beginning to unbalance as it routes payments - but maybe you can share further details on the chain of events and a screenshot to further troubleshoot
I’ve already closed out the channel, so I can’t provide any screenshots…apologies. It did update the balance of max send/ max receive correctly, but it pulled funds from my BlueWallet, as well as my node’s wallet, without ever combining the 2 balances. I loaded funds in each from separate sources, so they were totally separate balances. My understanding was that BlueWallet would just use my node for liquidity, so the max send/ receive would be affected, but the total sats in my node’s wallet should not have been. Thanks for any clarity you can provide!
I can give a rundown, I can preface by if you think there is any other error please feel free to recreate and share the steps you took, as well as you can post too on r/lightningnetwork maybe if others have had a similar issue
incoming wall o’ text,
Otherwise I can break down node management liquidity, so we shouldn’t really consider the LND offchain liqudity as a wallet in of itself, nor should we consider the LND onchain portion a Bitcoin wallet to store massive funds on…
Funding a Lightning Node: When you fund a Lightning node, you are essentially depositing bitcoins into a payment channel. This process involves creating an on-chain transaction and broadcasting it to the Bitcoin Lightning network. The funds you deposit are stored on-chain until you open a payment channel, so we should only use it for that purpose
To use the Lightning Network, you need to open a payment channel with another Lightning node. This channel allows you to transact off-chain, using the deposited funds as liquidity. The funds in the payment channel are not immediately settled on the Bitcoin blockchain, but when they are they are generally locked into that liquidity on the payment channel that will start balanced usually - same amount opened by you and the peer on other side
Off-Chain Transactions: Once you have opened a payment channel, you can use Lightning-compatible wallets like Blue Wallet to send and receive payments off-chain. These off-chain transactions do not require on-chain confirmations, making them faster and more cost-effective than traditional Bitcoin transactions.
Blue Wallet and LND Node: Blue Wallet is a mobile wallet application that supports the Lightning Network. It provides a user-friendly interface for managing Lightning channels and conducting off-chain transactions. LND (Lightning Network Daemon) is the software that powers the Lightning node. Blue Wallet can connect to an LND node to interact with the Lightning Network, it uses the liquidity of your LIghtning Node
Charging Off-Chain Liquidity: When you spend funds using Blue Wallet, the off-chain liquidity of your Lightning node is affected. Each off-chain transaction within the Lightning Network involves redistributing the balance of funds in the payment channel. If you spend more funds than your channel’s current capacity allows, you may need to close the channel or receive incoming payments to rebalance it
This will look like it’s spending from both locations. But, it is simply using the liquidity of your channel that is routing the payment
For rebalancing, it looks like it’s deducted from one side of the liqudity of the channel, so you must wait to route more payments or either peer would need to balance the channel
You can wait until your node routes another payment, the other peer rebalances their side, or you would spend Bitcoin to balance your channel - this is where you can create invoices as well on your Lightning Node too - there are many discussions on how best to accomplish this, some suggest avoiding the process of playing whack-a-mole manually and research and use node management software for your needs
As an example your Blue Wallet can have 10M satoshis in it, but if you only have 5M in off chain send and receive - these balances are different and you can’t find a payment route for the 10M, and then if you send 5M your Max Send goes down to 0 and your Max Receive goes up to 10M until you keep routing more,
I hope that helps, or helps any new users as well - otherwise I might suggest posting the error/history in Blue Wallet or the transaction history in your LIghtning Node app if you’re comfortable sharing to line it up to see what else may be going on and we can ping Blue Wallet team or see if anyone else sees something here…
I opened a channel with 700,000 sats liquidity . I then deposited 371,595 sats into blue wallet (lightning wallet). I made purchases of 112,937, 97,518 and 155,626. This left my blue wallet with a balance of 5,514. All of these transactions were also deducted from the max send side of the channel’s liquidity leaving me 333,919 max send. I closed out the channel and it deposited the 333,919 back into my on chain wallet. I fudged some of the exact numbers in the scenario bc there were fees, but this is essentially what happened.