teznode asked about 3 years ago

Closing channel before 12 months are over

I have entered a swap for 12 months,  what is the procedure to close channels ahead of 12 months?

2 Comments

LN+

LN+ Admin wrote about 3 years ago

Unfortunately, we can't enforce it. It's a ladies' / gentleman's agreement. You can go ahead and close it if you have to for some reason. But you may get a bad rating from your peer on this site.

What is the reason for closure? If you need the funds on-chain, there ways to get them out without closing. It's called looping out.


Lightning Hoarder

Lightning Hoarder wrote about 3 years ago

There IS a way to enforce it, using custom commitment formats. See PR#5549 on lnd, where it adds constraints where force-closing the channel applies restrictions on how far ahead (block-wise) the funds will be locked in, giving the incentive on keeping channel open.
Of course, you can do a co-operative close, but then you can enforce any restrictions on the other side as wished (including, not allowing co-op closes until some date is reached, or allowing closure if agreed by both parties).

This additional constraints consists of an additional CLTV that requires a channel lease's expiration to be met before the channel initiator is able to claim their funds back from the channel. This unfortunately doesn't serve as a guarantee that the channel purchased cannot be closed prematurely, as we still need to allow the commitment transaction to be broadcast to resolve in-flight HTLCs, but instead serves as an incentive to prevent the channel initiator from prematurely closing out a channel as they won't be able to claim their funds until the lease expires.

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