Been there, top of ‘17 tho. Keep paying attention and by ‘26/‘27 you’ll have a handle on things.

Lighting is a whole beast tho. Basics are you need both inbound and outbound liquidity. Liquidity is determined by channel sizes. When someone opens a channel to you, that is inbound, it means sats can flow from them, to you.

When you open a channel to someone, that’s outbound, from you, to them.

With pheonix, there is no way to request others open a channel to you. The only way to acquire inbound, is to send yourself sats, where a channel is then auto opened by ACINQ providing inbound, which is then immediately used up by the sats you’ve sent to yourself.

The only way to then create additional inbound without spending more sats opening new channels, is to spend the sats in the wallet, leaving an empty channel ready to receive.

Now that you’ve opened channels, send the sats back out to wallet of satoshi, and see hoe much you pay in fees. The next time sats are sent to your pheonix wallet, they will use the existing channel with excess liquidity, and you won’t lose 3000 sats opening a new one up.