Oh wow! Awesome that you stuck with it!
Discussion
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