Oddbean

When you have the outgoing liquidity on a channel and it closes, those sats get sent back onchain. If you have a channel where the liquidity is all your partner’s side (you only have incoming liquidity), your sats are setting another channel as outgoing. You can rebalance or wait for a route from that channel partner that rebalances when it pushes sats through. In my scenario, I had very few sats on my side as outgoing, had a really large route come through pushing liquidity to my partner. Then my partner closed the channel. So my partner kept his sats in the Lightning channels of his node and sent my sats back on chain. Kind of a dick move if you ask me. First time I’ve had that happen.

Ok, so you did have a lot of sats on your side as outgoing until the really large route came through and pushed the liquidity to your channel partner’s side. Now that your partner has most of the outgoing liquidity, he closed the channel. I guess I don’t understand why the partner would do that. Maybe numbers might help? Is it a dick move because you essentially helped him open channel only for him to close it once he was in a good position?

Not you have it backwards. I didn’t have much outgoing liquidity. My partner had the outgoing, so if the channel closed, the sats on his/her side would have gone back onchain. Then they’d be down liquidity on their node and need to find another partner to open with as well as would incur additional fees. It would appear that they seized an opportunity when a route passed from their side (send side) to my side (routing through me) that pushed liquidity off their side of the channel (to my side) and then closed the channel. When the channel closes, it sends whatever outgoing liquidity I had in the channel back onchain. Therefore it costs me sats when the channel closes which can’t be avoided, but it also costs me to open a new channel. In the end, it’s not that big of a deal. But the right thing to do would have been to close the channel when all the outgoing was on their side if they were unhappy with the channel. They made the decision, they should have incurred the hit. Now my node is out of balance and I’ll be looking for a replacement channel. As well as I have to wait on the funds to settle back onchain.