I took a #Bitcoin #Lightning Crash course this week. literally.
Duration: 1 week.
Number of hours: 20 hours.
Cost: $1500 + some collateral damage.
But I learned more about lightning than I learned over the past 8 months of running the node.
Course not recommended 😅
PV.
oh no. i am sorry... what happened?
My node got nuked. I couldn’t bring it to life. The #nodestriches helped a lot. But it was beyond repair.
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hmm. over the past few months i've helped several people recover funds from dead nodes. most recently nostr:npub1m5mr8y7wgvcufav43hgda376xsm0t5qrerur30m23ek6w8gmn88q9hympt and i helped a friend recover his funds by manually crafting transactions and working with the channel partner. do you still want some help? we may be able to help. no promises.
I think I’m fine now. Many force closed transactions are in the mempool. Hopefully they get confirmed and get some funds back. I’m good on that front.
But I have two peers that are down, so I can’t close with them since I don’t have channel data.
nostr:npub13cnlldwfhwxd6qf34hnwlfya2m2qrd2zfk0alxnrup6d2fasw9wqxwkzpe is one of the offline nodes and trying to get his node back. If you can help him, you help us both.
all he needs to do is have his seed and he can manually sign a transaction and you'll get your funds back from that channel you have with him. you can do this with chantools.
That's correct, don't give up if there are sats to be saved. The one thing about recovery from seed is you need to be able to have a dialogue, somehow, with your channel partner and be able to agree on how to split the funds in that 2 of 2 multisig
Good thing. The #nodestriches is one hell of a group!
I should have the seed phrase somewhere. (Dear God help me if I don't).
I've had this node die on my before in somewhat similar circumstances and was able to fix it so I'm hoping when I actually have the time I can revive it. Nows the time though, I hear fees are lowish.
Fees are great, if you compare main with the 300+ sats/vB just last month.
Best to get your ducks in a row and figure things like how you want to split it, where you want the funds to go, make sure you have the seeds and passphrase, and maybe familiarize yourself with chantools. The good thing is like and address that holds funds. They ain't going anywhere until the two people with keys move them. The channels from dead nodes that recovered a month ago were from nodes that got nukes in May '23
Bitcoin is unreal. 🧡
nostr:npub13cnlldwfhwxd6qf34hnwlfya2m2qrd2zfk0alxnrup6d2fasw9wqxwkzpe had a watch tower. Should make things even easier if we were able to access that.
Not sure the watchtower is able to access commitment transactions unless a breach is detected. I run an lnd tower and a teos tower and let me just say, it's damn near impossible to understand much of anything that's being stored and it's a MASSIVE amount of info. Very gobbledygook, if you know what I mean. Easiest just to take the seeds from each dead node and use those to sign a transaction that splits the funds between the two parties.
Basically one node creates a psbt with one signature that has the split to the two destinations. Then the psbt is sent to the other party to sign and broadcast after reviewing the proposed split.
Never mind then. We will have a gentleman’s agreement.
Hit me up if you need help when the time comes and I'll be happy to provide it. The tools you'll need are these and they can be a bit confusing but are very powerful for this kind of stuff.
Thanks mate.
Also if you have funds missing from your onchain wallet when your force closes get confirmed the sweepremoteclosed command from chantools is something you may need to do as well. With your node being offline sometimes when the other side force closes and your node isn't alive, funds can languish in sweep addresses that your main three pubkeys won't pick up. So don't despair if that happens, that one is fairly easy to do.
I'll shut up now about it, lol 🤓
No man! All of this is helpful.
They say we have a snow storm this weekend. Perfect timing to tinker with “home” improvements projects.
do you have any resources on how to use chantools i think i have funds somewhere that ive been trying to access for a while now and chantools sounds like a solution
You can get compiled binaries here. They have them for Linux/Mac/Windows. There's some ok explanations in the git too. You can just download the binary and then run the chantools
🙏🙏
Please don't do that again, ask here let us help you
Will remember that. Hopefully this never happens again.
It was probably corrupted channel.db nothing worked I tried everything.
Backups backups and more
I need to learn how to back up. Any recommendations?
Maybe a raid implementation?
Raid or manually to external storage. At the frequency that keeps you feeling sane.
How do you even back up channel.db? It changes every minute.
RAID lol, and build a watchtower in case your primary node goes down
Thanks. Will look into those.
For now lightning node backups are to safely force close and get your funds back on chain. Then you get to deal with re opening channels
But there are far more learned noderunners than I here
Yeah, that’s what seemed to work. And honestly not the worst way to go. It will only cost on chain fees. (Consider it back up fees).
nostr:npub18ams6ewn5aj2n3wt2qawzglx9mr4nzksxhvrdc4gzrecw7n5tvjqctp424 just added to my crash course with two very helpful tips.
I should recoup a good chunk of my node by the end of the week.
BTW, I was a bit shaken by all of this, I didn’t want to start a new node. This note made me realize it’s not that bad.
Learn and grow mate, build out a better node or... https://telegra.ph/Guide-to-building-a-Bitcoin-Super-Node-02-27 yay virtualization
Yikes 😟
I started my lesson in 2018…but in 2022 I got my coins back.
Oh wow! Awesome that you stuck with it!
More like I forgot about it until I had a lot of free time. I even tried to donate my seed /lnd folder to a prominent bitcoin educator who didn’t bother to pick up the free coins.
Anyhow, after a few years passed, software tools got written and made it possible for me to recover a few grand in coin.
I’m still not really a lightning use though. I never got comfortable with backup procedures.
After what I have gone through, I learned two things.
Know your peers.
Take care of your seed phrase.
FC channels that go offline because of node failure/ or inability to reach its owner.
No “back up” really needed.
sounds like you ran #LND, where peer availability is important in case you need to recover your funds via #SCB 😃
Yes that’s true. I had 8 channels. 6 are online. The other two I will try my best to contact them and get it figured out. It’s their money as well.
I set up a few channels but never spent from them. The thought was to set up channels and forget about them for a few years. But migrating to new hardware was tricky. Importing seed wasn’t enough despite never spending.
But why would you do that? What's the purpose of having 100% your-sided channels and not spending? To me it sounds like just putting some #bitcoin at risk :-)
If you run #CLN there are plenty of proper #backup solutions - on LND I guess you just have to copy everything during migration.
Just make sure to never start the old hardware again :D
Why? Transactions were essentially free back then. No funds at risk if node offline. Risk accumulates when someone sends you funds or routes through you.
Backup is needed to avoid penalty transaction. Suppose you set up a 1 btc channel to me and spend 1 sat and your machine crashes. Then you try to force close as if you spent nothing. Well, the penalty transaction gives me control of the full channel. You just lost almost an entire coin because you tried to cheat me out of a sat.
Very true. But so far I couldn’t find a way to do said backup properly. Channel db are fragile. Mine broke and could t get the info I needed, so my channel relied on the data of my peer to close, which technically I’m guessing here, could be manipulated with an older backup for example that favors my peer.
Maybe that’s where watchtowers come in handy. I need to learn how those work.
But that’s why I say know your peers. If you setup a channel with a peer you “trust” it would be less likely to be cheated out of sats.
Exactly
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