I am not sure what you mean by that. In short, when you open a channel, you cannot receive any coins through it because the other person does not have any coins on their side of the exactly same channel. As you spend coins through that channel, the balance of the other party increases. Once their balance is higher than the required channel reserve, you can receive coins through that channel.
- Alice opens a channel to node Bob.
- Charlie opens a channel to node Bob.
- They both deposit 10 mBTC and they wait for the required confirmations.
So now Alice and Charlie can both send ~10 mBTC to each other by none of them can receive. In order to do that they'll have to increase their receiving capacity.
Can you continue this sentence further?The node keeps ~20 mBTC on two different 2-of-2 multisig addresses. Why is sending/receiving capacity required? Charlie says to Bob that he wants to transfer 5 mBTC to Alice and thus, the node shares the new balance of each side.
15 mBTC to Alice and 5 mBTC to Charlie. So now the current, signed from both sides, transaction can be broadcasted to the blockchain. Charlie has signed that he'll transfer 5 mBTC from his multi-sig address to Alice's.
Where am I wrong? I'm trying to understand the capacity thing and it doesn't make any sense to me.