Opening my first channel

Hey there @salthom

Here’s a short guide: Managing Liquidity and Lightning Node Basics

Basically, we need to pick a peer to open to - that peer opens back the same capacity to you - you can find someone in the community, use a marketplace like Lightning Network+, or a Liquidity Service Provider as described in the guide,

Simply sending to a lightning wallet like Wallet of Satoshi won’t suffice, though you can connect your lightning wallet to use for transactions once you’ve used onchain funds to open an offchain channel,

For instance, if I want 1 Million satoshis of liquidity - so that my lighting wallets can send back and forth 500k sats, I could pick a Liquidity Service Provider and open the channel for 500k sats, then that peer opens 500k back to me… then I have a 1 Million capacity channel with 500k receive and send liquidity,

Any wallets I connect now can throughput 500k sats back and forth, you’ll notice as transactions are sent out this effects the balancing of the channel, so you become your own backend of your lightning wallet…

I hope that was a good explanation, feel free to check out the guide or connect a lightning wallet to your Lightning Node app when you’re ready, after you’ve secured some liquidity.