⭐ Merited by JayJuanGee (1)
When I make a new channel it says I can only receive the amount on a channel that I have spent down. So how did the first address get spent down enough to receive the first lightning tokens?
When you open a channel you are essentially giving your money to someone else while making certain arrangements that ensure that they can't spend it themselves without your permission (think of it like a wad of cash that you hand to someone else with a string attached that you can yank if you see them doing anything fishy
).No, not it is not "giving away your money" to someone else. It is more like sending your money for safe keeping in a multisig address that you can get anytime you want. "Giving away" implies you already "lost" control over your money, but what stops it is the "rules".
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Next what you can renegotiate the arrangements so that you can now only take back part of it and not all of it. This renegotiation where you went from being able to take back all of it to now only being able to take part of it is what we refer to as a lightning transaction. So you see what is missing from your equation is that the other party has not made a similar but opposite arrangement with you. They have not given you money that they could take back at any time. They could have though, if they wanted to, and if they had than you would have had no problem in receiving without spending down first.
Let's make it simple. "You can spend only up to what you, or what the person in the other end, put in a channel".