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#LNMETA
During all the mempool nonsense just recently, I just watched a node manually drain out all my liquidity through their side, paid some handsome fees, and closed the channel on me.
Curious watching the overall game theory play out.
Is the person on the other side of the channel trying to cheat you?
I have a lot of interest in how LN pool is working as a second/third layer for BTC
Bob what are your thoughts on this?
any idea on your BTC outlays vs your BTC intakes. You have been running one a while.
I have been running lightning nodes since the very beginning (One of the first 200 nodes was mine) , and have had catastrophic hard drive failures, and made big mistakes.
So with Bob's channel... if I understand Bob opened the channel, the value was on his side. This other node pulled all that liquidity to their side, and then closed the channel. The only way for this to have happened is for Bob's other channels to have gained that same liquidity. And when the other node closed the channel they deserved every single sat they got, and Bob has all of those same number of sats PLUS fees on other channels.
There are many ways one can lose money on the lightning network. But this is absolutely not one of them. The way that channel operators are MOST vulnerable to would be the opposite scenario. The other node opens the channel to Bob. Bob pulls ALL that liquidity to HIS side of the channel (and loses an equal amount on other channels) and THEN the channel partner waits for Bob to go OFFLINE and force closes the channel with a fraudulent balance (I still have all the sats on MY side!!! ). IF there are no watchtowers, then they might get away with this. We have seen VERY little of this sort of thing yet.
I have done the math on my own nodes. I have never lose a sat due to anything like this. In fact, even after my hard drive failure I have not lost a single sat.
Interestingly I do have ONE zombie channel open with a node. That node opened the channel for 5000000 sats. There was never any transactions, and they disappeared before my node went down. For them to get their value back they have to force close this channel but they have been offline for months. Eventually, if I want to, I can craft and execute a close for this channel for the entire balance, and since they are not online I will get it. I have nothing to lose, since even if a watchtower saw me try to lie there is not penalty I can even pay. All those sats are really his.
I will never do this. If that other node comes back they will always be able to reclaim those bitcoin.