Hey all,
I have a channel with JapanLightningHub and they have been inactive/ offline for over a week now.
This has made me uncomfortable and I would like to get my remote balance back into my local balance so that I may close the channel.
Current balance is about 0.3m / 0.2m or 60% / 40%
I assume I am correct in thinking that if I close the channel in its current state, that the remote balance will remain with the JapanLightningHub?
Appreciate your help, thanks
Those coins in the remote balance don’t belong to you. If coins were sent through you then you’ll have additional balance on one of your other channels. There is no risk to your coins with them being off line. The risk is actually on their side if you were to place a previous channel state closure you’d be able to get more coins. However if you did that and they came back online they could show an up to date channel state and they get the entire channel balance. Don’t do that.
If you close the channel you get whatever is on your local balance side, minus any fees paid by whomever opened the channel.
Short of the long is that there’s no need to close the channel immediately. Those funds on your side are safely locked into a multisig account and will remain that way until they close the channel or you close it.
Now, they may have had catastrophic failure and may have to perform whats called a breach closure where you would end up with the entire channel balance. I’d wait it out and maybe you get lucky.
Edit: Might I also add, what if your node crapped out and you took a week or two for replacement parts to come in? Then after you get everything up and running you find all your channels are closed. That would suck.
Thank you for the response, appreciate it.
This is a different (and n00bish) but somewhat related question, seeing as you slightly touched on it.
When I initially setup the channel, i set it up with 5mil sats in my local balance and there was 0 in remote. I rebalanced and moved 2mil sats to the remote balance and although i understand that those sats being with the remote node means they’re in their hands, I still see them as my funds. As of yet, there have been no payments routed through our channel.
I will heed your advice and leave the channel open, you have calmed my mind, but in the event that I do need to close the channel, how would I go about retrieving the remote balance, which I placed there?
Thanks
When you re-balanced it sent those coins from your local balance to your remote balance but your coins then returned to you on another channels local balance. Anything on the remote side is the other peers coins, always. Remote balance is coins you can receive and would switch to local balance once the transaction happened.
When closing the channel you use Thunderhub which allows you to set the fee. you’d select close channel, then set said fee and then close the channel. Your coins from the local balance arrive into your on chain Umbrel wallet minus fees if you had opened the channel. Anything on the remote balance side is sent to your peers on chain wallet.
I’d give them 2-4 weeks, maybe longer. If you wanted a good BOS score then you’d look to close it out sooner and use those funds to open a more stable channel.
Again…remote balance is NOT yours. Local balance is yours. You want a remote balance otherwise you can not receive payments.
Ah, yes. Of course.
Thank you, I appreciate your help and your patience, you’ve been of great help.