Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: [lightning] giving access to my lightning node to friends and family
by
ndalliard
on 19/07/2021, 08:14:29 UTC
thanks everyone for jumping in and sharing your thoughts

That's fair, but it's more likely some of them will have understanding problems about bitcoin/LN that's make the project harder.
i agree with you, that lightning atm is not that user friendly, although i think it is getting better. and that is what i think will happen in the future with lightning even more. email was also a mess in the beginning, but you got used to it and the apps/software got better/more user friendly

maybe this is what acinq is doing or bluewallet with their lndhub?
LNDHub would allow your family members to use your node's channels for all of their transactions. They wouldn't need to open any channels. Instead, they would need to deposit coins to an address generated by your node. Then, they would be able to spend exactly the amount they deposited. They could also receive coins without depositing anything.

...

The biggest disadvantage is that they would be limited by the liquidity in the channel between you and them.
alright, this sounds interesting and i see now, that opening channels to every family member or friend is probably not the best solution (see your comment about the liquidity)

In such cases, channel becomes inactive. Closing means settling the balance on-chain. It wouldn't make much sense to close the channel only because the other party went offline for a short period of time. Still, it is not possible to create a channel that cannot be closed.
yes, i meant that the channel doesn't get closed for some weird reasons, only when both or one side wants to close it, but i think that is already the case and some closes happen sometimes for some technical bugs or when there is no unanimity with closing fees for example (still figuring this out)

Maybe LNbits https://lnbits.org/ Not sure what exactly it does, also never used it, but it claims to be an accounting system.
thanks for bringing lnbits up - it also works for c-lightning. will dig into this too