Author: Rusty Russell 2017-12-18 18:40:20
Published on: 2017-12-18T18:40:20+00:00
The lightning network uses millisatoshis as the units for its channels, as payments of less than a few thousand satoshi are impractical and channel closing costs dwarf the gains to be made from cheating. The maximum channel funding size is determined by setting the four most significant bytes of `amount_msat` to 0, giving a maximum HTLC value of .04294967295 BTC. The optional initial push of millisatoshis during the channel creation is for the common case where you want to connect to someone and make a payment immediately. Defining the timeout closing out a channel when someone does not cooperate is covered in BOLT #2. If there's no in-progress payment, there's no reason to close a channel to an unreachable peer, unless you want to abandon the channel and get the funds back.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T17:11:23.180285+00:00