Nostr Web Client

Folks, I need a bit of help to understand Lightning.

I have a few questions (and they might be a bit dumb):

1. „Opening a channel“ is my first tx with another person, right?

2. What is it called to send my first tx from on-chain to my Phoenix wallet? Is this also „opening a channel“?

3. If I download a wallet on a friends phone and want to send him some sats but he doesn’t have any sats in the wallet, it isn’t possible because he needs sats first to have impound liquidity, except he is using a wallet with an integrated LSP that provides this for him (by doing some magic in the back round)?

4. This is the weirdest concept for me. Let’s say I have a payment channel with Bob. Bob sent me 120 sats. I send Bob 100 sats. I am dishonest and want to close the channel with the “receipt” of when Bob sent me 120 sats. I close the channel and broadcast my tx on-chain. Now Bob has let’s say 7 days to go on-chain and catch me cheating. But Bob decides he doesn’t care about on-chain because he only uses LN anyway. So he sends the 100 sats the he thinks he has (from me) to pay Alice. Now Alice has the 100 sats that I try to steal from Bob. Now Alice buys something with the 100 sats from Joe. Now Joe has my 100 sats that I am trying to steal. After 7 days neither Bob, Alice or Joe go on-chain and I am able to steal the 100 sats without getting caught. On-chain I own the 100 sats. But what happens with the 100 sats that Joe apparently owns in his LN wallet?

I hope anyone with a deep understanding sees this post and is willing to answer.

Please share if you don’t mind for better reach.

Cheers

Kasso 2y ago

Hi there, I'm going to try to explain:

1 If You manualy open a channel to soneone else, You peer your lightning node to that person first. After that You can open a channel with that person. By doing that, You're making an on chain transaction in order to get the sats within lightning. After confirmed on chain, You have now the amount of sats outbound liquidity to the other lightning node. The other lightning node has now inbound liquidity of that same amount from You. This means that You'll be able to transact via lightning to him or route a lightning payment via him further on lightning (assuming he has lightning channels setup to others too.)

2 Phoenix wallet is a self custodial wallet. However it takes care of all the lightning setup for You. So that means that instead of You setting up manualy lightning channels, it does it for You. It's an easier experience for non technical people to use.

3 One don't need sats on lightning to have inbound liquidity. The only requirement is that someone else opened a channel to his lightning node. In the case of using Phoenix wallet, he or she can receive it anyway.

4 This hypothetical scenario is not really clear to me, but I think that it would involve the breach remedy:

Breach Remedy: Since lightning transactions are a timestamped list of signed transactions where the split of funds varies, it is possible for one party to attempt to cheat (breach trust) by unilaterally closing a channel with an old transaction where they hold more funds. This results in a time-lock, and during this period, the aggrieved party can not only recover their own funds but swipe the entire capacity of the channel using a “Breach Remedy” transaction, as described in the Bitcoin Lightning Network white paper.

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