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.
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.)
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?
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.
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?
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.
Appreciate this a lot, will jump in chat in a little bit!
I'm not saying I know exactly why, but the times I have seen that before, the person had a small number of channels where the peers did not have enough outgoing liquidity along the possible paths to service the payment. Channels should be established with well-connected peers with sufficient liquidity.
Thanks - appreciate this.
