OK, back to this.
The only reason you are correct here is because he was analyzing the wrong set of blocks, which you didn't know until right now. The fuckup happened in a block previous to 600,000 -- read below.
It is glaringly a dispositive. During the previous 10,000 block period there were exactly 6 penalty transactions totaling 0.09746883 BTC. It is less than 1/10th of 1 BTC -- not just "less than 1 BTC." A penalty transaction has
distinct characteristics:
LN channel = multisig UTXO.
To change channel balance write new tx spending the UTXO. Both sign but dont broadcast.
They all:
- are V0_P2WPKH type transactions
- are roughly the same size of 237-238 B, 121 vB, 483-484 WU
- use SegWit addresses
There is a way to filter through transaction data based on this criteria.
If his counterparties were on the beneficial side of a stale closing tx, what is their incentive to issue a penalty? They stand to win more through just letting the mistaken stale tx broadcasts lie as is. Seems we need to at least consider that possibility before closing the case. As at least one scenario.
So far none of the 400 nodes connected to him reported receiving any funds. What is more likely is he has the funds, can't access them, and they are far fewer than 4 BTC in total.
There are LN experts working pretty hard to help this guy recover his funds.
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/2468It seems like this guy did everything wrong on purpose. Its hard to believe someone would crash through several safeguards so recklessly if he cared at all about his BTC. My bet is when his funds are restored it will surface that the total "lost" was far less than 4 BTC.