Recovered on Chain balance not accessible/pending

Support and Troubleshooting
1

After my node crashed I had to set up a new one. Had a channel backup file form pretty much right before the crash. Used the ‘sed’ command as instructed but my on chain balance is still only a fraction of what it was before recovery. Even after 1 week. 2 channels are still pending to close.
What is worse ist that I can’t use the already recovered on chain balance at all. I can’t open new channels nor transfer it out. It’s basically locked in. Can I at least recover that or do I have to write it all off? Would kind of make the recovery phrase and channel backup obsolete. Can anyone help?

2

Try using recovering it with bluewallet.

3

I just did that. It is showing 0 BTC and only old transactions. Needless to say that is even less than what my Bitcoin Wallet in the Lightning Node is showing. Not sure what to do next. I still have 3 channels shown as pending to close in Thunderhub (unfortunately without a closing transaction) whereas all the others are showing as closed as remote force close. Those transactions are all confirmed plenty of times within mempool. It seems that those have also been deposited in my Bitcoin Wallet on the node. But again, I can’t access those sats. In ThunderHub they are shown as pending. Super frustrating. Does anyone else have any advice?

Maybe one more thing, only one of the pending to close channels is also still a peer of the node. Seems like the others crashed or closed at the same time.

4

I did some more digging but couldn’t find a solution in this forum that worked. I have a significant limbo balance. Can anyone help? The maturity is negative and mempool is also showing a ton of confirmations.

Here is one of them as an example:

"channel":  {
                "remote_node_pub":  "02a8d15cxxxxf",
                "channel_point":  "6ed420dad5cf5b6f7xxxx10b3e:1",
                "capacity":  "2500000",
                "local_balance":  "2429459",
                "remote_balance":  "0",
                "local_chan_reserve_sat":  "0",
                "remote_chan_reserve_sat":  "0",
                "initiator":  "INITIATOR_LOCAL",
                "commitment_type":  "ANCHORS",
                "num_forwarding_packages":  "0",
                "chan_status_flags":  "",
                "private":  true,
                "memo":  ""
            },
            "closing_txid":  "ebb37e4b5b71c38e5e204b878f03f11a6044d116df7ad1472450bfe2950c7e93",
            "limbo_balance":  "2429789",
            "maturity_height":  825464,
            "blocks_til_maturity":  -1085,
            "recovered_balance":  "0",
            "pending_htlcs":  [],
            "anchor":  "LIMBO"
5

Me again. So reinstalling the lightning node and chantools almost got the job done. Quite a task for what was supposed to be an easy recovery.

I have one last channel pending and thus also the sats. chantools doesn’t work here because the channel only provides an onion-address. Does anyone have any idea what to do in this case?

6

The Channel is still not closed. Tried to contact the node through Lightningnetwork+ to ask for a force close from their side but no response. Does anyone have any other idea? Really need those sats.

7

Hi, still not closed. If there is no-one here that is able to help? Is there another forum anyone can suggest?

8

Can you share the lncli pendingchannels output and give some more context on the last channel you’re missing? What happened?

Have a review at this topic, where we’ve been successful using chantools to recover from an SCB.

9

Hi,

thanks for responding. Basically the HDD got corrupted originally and I had to restart from scratch.
So the current pending channel status is below. Due to the chan_status_flag “ChanStatusRestored”, I can’t force close it with chantools and such. Every app I’ve tried it shows as “closing”. My sats are definitely still stuck in there. The peer’s node seems to be up and running. No idea what else to try. Happy for any suggestions.

{
    "total_limbo_balance":  "0",
    "pending_open_channels":  [],
    "pending_closing_channels":  [],
    "pending_force_closing_channels":  [],
    "waiting_close_channels":  [
        {
            "channel":  {
                "remote_node_pub":  "03c09fe83882c2ce26xxx58c36dcfd5d8",
                "channel_point":  "62911f4e54b00b638e088f8cb8856cf5c2xxx6586fa00c:1",
                "capacity":  "2500000",
                "local_balance":  "0",
                "remote_balance":  "0",
                "local_chan_reserve_sat":  "0",
                "remote_chan_reserve_sat":  "0",
                "initiator":  "INITIATOR_LOCAL",
                "commitment_type":  "ANCHORS",
                "num_forwarding_packages":  "0",
                "chan_status_flags":  "ChanStatusRestored",
                "private":  true,
                "memo":  ""
            },
            "limbo_balance":  "0",
            "commitments":  {
                "local_txid":  "",
                "remote_txid":  "",
                "remote_pending_txid":  "",
                "local_commit_fee_sat":  "0",
                "remote_commit_fee_sat":  "0",
                "remote_pending_commit_fee_sat":  "0"
            },
            "closing_txid":  ""
        }
    ]
}
10

Do you have a chance to contact your peer and ask them to force-close it?

11

Yes, that was my thought as well. Tried to contact him through the Lightningnetwork+ messaging service. No response. Not sure if there are other ways to contact your peers. Any idea?

12

Hm, check if they have other contact info on https://amboss.space/

Or if they happened to claimed their node with Cheese-Bot on Telegram: @cheeserobot

Otherwise you could try to reach them via keysend, but no guarantee they will see it.

13

Hi, thanks for all the advice. Tried it all but couldn’t reach him. Yesterday he finally closed the channel. Phew! More than one month to recover…

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