I’m trying to figure out setting up Lightning on my Start9 server and possibly using a couple of Bitaxe to pool mine to Ocean.
I originally set up Core Lightning with a few channels but was never able to send any sats or even use boltz.exchange. It would never find a route.
After doing some reading here, I saw a recommendation for setting up LND and opening a channel with Core. I set up LND , opened a channel with Acinq with 500k sats, opened channel with Core, closed other channels on Core and sent 400k sats back to myself via boltz. My question is that I have noticed that my sats with Acinq on the local side slowly decrease over time while the remote side sats stay the same even though I am not moving/sending any, is that right? Do I just not understand the fees or is Acinq slowly stealing my sats? Any other channels I should open?
Looks like sats are also slowly draining from my channel with core and my total balance of sats is going down.
No, other than swaps on the base layer to change the channel size (very unlikely in this scenario) the total channel capacity should remain constant (meaning sats can move back and forth from one side to the other, but it should always add up to exactly the same amount of sats. You should never see one side decreasing while the other side remains the same.
If I were to guess, the UI is probably subtracting some amount from your side to cover min channel balance or something, and it is trying to only show you the amount you can spend. Are you using thunderhub for your UI? I don’t think RTL does that (at least I’ve never noticed it)
I’m using RTL. When I first noticed at 5:20 pm today it said I had 97,191 stats on the local side and 400,406 on the remote side and the total balance of lightning and on chain was 526,623. Just now it says that I have 96,916 local and 400,406 remote and total balance of lightning and on chain of 526,074. My channel with core went from 147,598 local/ 150,000 remote at 5:20 to 147,324 local/150,000 just now. I have not made any transactions today. Not sure what’s going on.
I’ve not noticed this before (but I will watch some of my channels to see. I think the clue is that the amount reduced on each channel is essentially the same (within 1 sat) This combined with rising transaction fees (as people are trying not to get liquidated on their loans and need to move collateral – happens every time there is a price crash), the channel partners negotiate a fee rate with the node that opened the channel in case there is ever an emergency closure. As on-chain fees go up, this amount increases. I know that some interfaces subtract this from the amount displayed (as they are showing you the amount you can send since people get confused about minimum channel balances). I just never noticed that RTL did this.