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Super frustrated with lightning today. Feels like I’m missing something obvious.

Have ~40k sats sitting on my side of a channel, tried sending 30k (and also 20k) of those sats to a lightning address, but get “insufficient balance failure” instead. Set max paths to 100 and max fee to 500 sats.

Nodestrich ♾️ 2y ago

How many channels do you have and how well-connected is your node?

You can jump into our chat if you need some advice. (Link in my bio.)

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Discussion

symbsrcool 2y ago

Have 4-5 channels. Using thunderhub on a voltage LND node.

Could my issue be related to the specific channel I’m trying to send out from - like my peer has a low balance or something?

Rich Nost 2y ago

Yes. If there isn't enough outgoing liquidity along the paths to the node you are paying, the payment will fail. This often happens when people have a small number of channels with relatively small pleb nodes. The path to the destination might be circuitous with a bottleneck of liquidity along the way.

symbsrcool 2y ago

So interesting. When I set up this lightning node I rushed to get a bunch of smallish channels quickly from amboss.

Right now there’s like 50k sats total that are stuck on these small channels - would best thing to do is wait and try again hoping some liquidity is added?

Rich Nost 2y ago

I might consider closing all channels while fees are cheap, and pool your liquidity into one channel with a very well-connected node. Going forward, maybe stack a little more before establishing larger channels. Small public channels don't really do anyone any good.

symbsrcool 2y ago

Going to do this. What would be a good threshold to consider a channel too small?

Rich Nost 2y ago

Lots of nodes set minimum channel and htlc sizes. I don't know what the mean or median of that is across the network graph. Personally, my smallest channel is 500k sats.

symbsrcool 2y ago

Appreciate this a lot, will jump in chat in a little bit!