Thinking about running a lightning node but I have some questions.

I understand that to have inbound liquidity I can open a channel and send sats to the other side however this effectively means that whoever is on the other side of the channel has sats just sitting there locked up as inbound liquidity for me.

Assuming I am not a routing node why would they do this?

They have to lock sats that they can't spend through me since I am not routing. Would they not just close the channel to get their sats back?

And if they keep closing the channel how do I maintain having inbound liquidity?

Is the only option for reliable inbound liquidity to rent it from a LSP? It seems there is no incentive for a channel partner to offer this for free.

#bitcoin #lightning #asknostr