- when you open a channel, you cannot receive before sending some first
Is this a feature of the Lightning Network or just the Electrum client?
It varies per wallet. Custodial wallets don't have this problem, and Phoenix Wallet creates a channel larger than your deposit, so you have (sending and receiving) capacity in both directions.
I don't think it's good for the LN in general if users are unable to start instantly receiving bitcoins.
I know this isn't the case for Layer 1 but think about it, imagine if you generated a wallet, but Bitcoin's design was totally different from how it is right now and you could not receive any bitcoins in a transaction before you made an outgoing transaction first.
It's a strange design choice, if you ask me.
I don't think it's really a choice, it's inevitable given the way LN works. If you want to receive funds without sending some first, someone can open a channel to your node and send a payment.
Let's face it: Bitcoin can't scale on-chain, but LN can't be used to create many channels on-chain either. So for mass adoption, LN has to be largely custodial.
And this is exactly the kind of problems that we should be addressing not merely with bugfixes and new features, but also with new network ideas.
It is hardly an improvement in the scaling problem to tell everyone to use custodial LN channels to get paid BTC. We might as well increase the block size at that point. Not your keys, not your coins anyway.
However...Mixers seem to have a lot of liquidity. If they team up with wallets so that
they run Lightning channels that automatically connect to those non-custodial wallets by default when a user creates their own channel, then this whole custodial LN thing will evaporate.