Wait, I'm not following you. Let's say Alice and Bob open a channel, both put 0.1 BTC in it. They both do some payments and then Bob is broke, and Alice still has 0.02 BTC. They want to close the channel, now what's the rule regarding who pays the miner fee to close/settle the channel? I always assumed they'd just split the miner fee automatically? But since Bob lost all his money already he doesn't care about settling so unless he's forced to pay, then the payment will be for Alice ?
Well money needs to move from Bob to Alice on the main block-chain so Bob picks up the $30 miners fee and Bob has no option but to settle the bill
because he (His wallet really) signed the micro transactions that happened on the private ledger to agree to payments and the $30 fee comes out
his BTC on the public block-chain
in this case Bob's 0.1BTC was lock on the main BC and is sent to Alice and at the same time her original 0.1BTC also gets unlocked on the BC
as an atomic transaction so maybe Bob and Alice were forced to leave $30 in the main BC for each new channel they open to cover the $30
miners fees, sorry not sure.
Sorry if I misunderstand you but it seems you don't understand the concept of LN (maybe you do but then I don't understand your post). The money doesn't move 'on chain' from Bob to alice. Both deposit 0.1 BTC into their channel, THAT is an on-chain transaction. When everything is settled the money needs to move from the channel to, in this case, Alice. What I don't know though is how these fees are divided. Do both pay $30 for opening the channel (when they both wire money into the channel) ? I think this might be the case since both move money into the channel, so that's 2 transactions on-chain (one on-chain transaction from Alice and one on-chain from Bob, both into the channel). When closing 1 transactions from the channel to Alice takes place, but who pays for this one ?