“If using a wallet like Phoenix be careful, you need to make sure to loop out because they will splice out your liquidity if you send on chain directly.”
Can you explain the loop out part further because I think it happened to me once. I purchased 1 million sats of liquidity and then made an on chain transfer when I reached that amount. After the transfer, my liquidity was reduced (I thought the liquidity purchased would be good for a year).
Loop out is a service where you send sats on Lightning to a 3rd party and give them an on chain deposit address. They then send you the sats - network fees - a service fee. I think the most popular service is provided by lightning.terminal. Basically it allows you to move sats from lightning back to on chain without closing a channel.
Loop out often is used to get inbound liquidity as well. You can open a channel and then loop out some of the funds.
Specific to Phoenix, I am not sure exactly how it works, especially if you prepurchase the inbound liquidity from acinq, but basically if you send funds on your side of the channel to an on chain address they splice out most of the liquidity. I didn’t realized how it worked the fist time I tried to use it. I sent 1mil sats to my Phoenix wallet on lightning, acinq opened a channel with my phoenix node of like 1.016 mil sats with 1 mil on my side, then i sent from phoenix to onchain and they spliced out 1mil of my liquidity, leaving me with a 16k capacity channel with me (all invoubd liquidity). I though it was going to work like a loop out leaving me with 1mil sats of inbound liquidity but it doesnt work that way.
You can also use boltz exchange to move from lightning to on chain. It works similarly (perhaps identically) to Loop Out/In.
Basically I did the same thing you did without prepurchasing the liquidity. It must work the same way, the benifit of prepurchasing the liqudity is probably that you dont have to pay on chain fees every time you send to your phoenix wallet (assuming you arent sending out of phoenix on ln). ie: u buy 1 mil sats liquidity and then send 100k to it sats 10 times and only pay the onchain fees once, vs if u dont prebuy the liquidity you have to pay on chain fees for all 10 transfers, paying to splice in more liquidity for the last 9 100k sat transactions.
Also prebuying the liquidity prepays for the on chain transaction of opening the channel, you can do it when fees are low and the liquidity will already be there when you want to recieve.
