Author: Alan Carbery 2017-11-21 09:07:05
Published on: 2017-11-21T09:07:05+00:00
Alan Carbery reached out to Rusty Russell seeking clarification about the Lightning Network's channel funding mechanism. While tutorials show an example where both Alice and Bob put 5BTC into the funding transaction, Alan was puzzled because the spec for open_channel has the funding_satoshis attribute whereas accept_channel does not. He wondered if this meant that each channel is funded by one party only but payments can be made in both directions assuming some initial payments are made. Additionally, he asked why there was a rationale for one-sided channel funding. Rusty responded that the channels are bidirectional and that both sides send a batch of updates followed by a commitment, then the other side replies with an ack. Both sides can do this independently and it all works out.
Updated on: 2023-05-24T03:18:21.394954+00:00