Author: ZmnSCPxj 2017-12-14 03:11:56
Published on: 2017-12-14T03:11:56+00:00
When you pay out of your Lightning Network node, your money is safe even if the network goes down. However, when you receive money, it is possible for your counterparty to transmit an old invalid state where it owns more money than you do. In this case, you need to monitor the blockchain for invalid closings of channel state and cannot be offline for more than a few days. If you are going to receive money anyway, you might as well enable routing so that you can earn some fees to offset the fees you would have to pay to spend your money.The protocol has two settings - "max_htlc_value_in_flight_msat" and "max_accepted_htlcs" - which limit your exposure to routing risk. These limits control how much of your channel funds can be spent on routing and the number of routes that should be used at a time on that channel. If those limits would be violated by a route attempting to go to you, the route simply fails and the payer will have to find another route.If you block all routing through your node, your deposit is only used by you, but it can potentially affect the availability of your deposit for your own transactions. To avoid this, you should connect but accept no incoming connections and make your outgoing channels private (not sent by node gossip) so that others will not route through you. However, this mode of operation makes your channels effectively unidirectional only from you to the rest of the network, and you cannot receive money on-Lightning or earn any money from routing fees. In the long run, it is better to receive funds via Lightning Network and hence make your channels public and accept incoming channels. At least, you should accept incoming money and a few routing attempts at a time to earn some fees and offset the fees on your own transactions. This leads to a more mesh-like network and makes you a better member of the network.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T17:08:02.861839+00:00