Bitnoob asked about 3 years ago

Half of lighting channel funds returned after channel was force closed.

One of the participants in a 2 million sats Pentagon swap had to force close (due to problems with their node after an upgrade) and re-established channels after upgrading successfully. However, I noticed that only approx half the funds (slightly over 1 million sats) were returned back to my BTC wallet after the channel was force closed by the participant. 

On checking the transaction ID on ThunderHub, I noticed 4 payments made when the 2 million sats, 2 by 2 multisig lightning channel was closed by the participant. Two were small payments (most likely, channel closing fees) and the remaining funds were almost equally split and sent to two BTC addresses. Once of those was received by my BTC wallet and I am not sure who the other BTC wallet belongs to. 

I had a few channels with smaller amount of sats closed by others previously and all the funds were returned during those closures (minus channel closing fees). 
I am wondering if anyone knows how this could have happened with this particular lightning channel closure. 

(I have not provided any info here like transaction ID, swap # as I wish my node to remain anonymous. I am not sure if my anonymity can be broken by revealing those details publicly). 

1 Comment

c-app.net wrote about 3 years ago

Perhaps this channel  was already rebalanced before closed. 
It is expected that under normal circumstances, the other half of the funds would have been transferred to another channels. 
You need to check the balance of other channels to see if they exist.

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