I keep hearing about people's lightning nodes having to force close things and it sounds like they are losing a lot of sats somehow. Is that right? Is lightning somehow a fucked protocol? Please forgive and correct my ignorance on this topic. I'm interested not in the gory details, nor summary opinions, but in correct succinct explanations.
Discussion
I have only experienced issues with LND
All the problems I've ever heard of were from people running LND.
nodes are just software like any others and have bugs. You shouldn’t ever need to force close unless explicitly done yourself or your counterparty is trying to rob you.
not trying to rob you but if there is a risk
The experience with my node is that force closures are very rare. Still annoying but in no way a show stopper. Cost is negligible when on chain fees are low, annoying if they are high.
relevant, just today from nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpzamhxue69uhkvun2daekstnwdaehgu339e3k7mgqyzt3r5dt4qr28g59lulg05t4jqkz7fg8gxrqm8r9jq7gkh5x867cz3f3ytq , note136sdzskdv5wa3sfreptjxtss3c0c6dvqczfhlwjplpr9wfu58u8q7wtz5t
I am running a LND node for four years and had just one force-close which was initiated automatically by the remote side for inexplicable reasons. The mempool fees where low back then and there were no HTLCs to be settled (expect for the closing tx itself) so I didn't really lose a significant amount of sats. But I indeed know people who had a lot of force-closes within a short period of time. It can be painful if this happens in a high fee environment. It gets even worse when there are lots of HTLCs to be settled (thus I limited the maximum amount of pending HTLCs to 5). But overall my LND node runs pretty reliably.
I haven't had issues with force-closures on my LND node so far, but I also am pretty selective about my counter-parties.
I have heard LND has more issues than CLN with that, though. Of course, the vast majority of lightning nodes are LND, so that might skew things, too. I would consider going full CLN, but Nostr is heavily reliant on lightning addresses for zaps. Need Bolt-12 for zaps, y'all!
The issue I have is with power reliability. Despite having a UPS, I went twice on a trip, and twice I came back to my node turned off. Of course, I couldn't use my node to zap. And it closed my channels. Plus, once I had to recover it because the hard drive was corrupted...
On my end, I don't blame it on lightning. But I haven't opened any new channels. Too risky.
LND is an attack