FAQ

my node won't let me spend the on chain funds what is going on? your lnd node requires what is called an "anchor reserve " an anchor reserve keeps an amount of funds in the on chain wallet of your node as a reserve for commitment fees in case of force close the reserve amount is 10,000sats multipled by the number of channels you have up to a maximum of 100,000sats if you wish to withdraw these funds, you will have to close channels to unlock them this is a protection mechanism built into the lnd software to increase the probability of force closed channels confirming in a timely manner my node won't let me make a payment even though i have a local balance what is going on? if you have less than 1% of the channel capacity as outbound, it will not be able to be spent because that is the channel reserve example if you have a 500,000 sat channel, you need at least 5,000 sats of outbound before you can spend this is a lightning network protocol rule for security and fraud incentive prevention should i create new channels for inbound and outbound liquidity, or is the current voltage provided channel enough? the free voltage channel is to help get you started, but is by no means meant to be the only channel you rely on depending on your goals with the node, you may need more inbound, more outbound, or both for this we have a couple guides outbound liquidity docid\ yz5akgkmdwkvqok17py6y and inbound liquidity docid\ vlivlagn4rjdgtql5nvyw what benefits come from having multiple channels versus putting all my sats into a single channel? the biggest reason to have multiple channels to a variety of high quality peers is to increase probability of payment success if you rely only on a couple channels, the payment failure rate goes up we recommend minimum 10 channels with peers from the top 200 on terminal lightning engineering to have sufficient payment success how many sats should i have to open a channel? the big thing ot keep in mind is that the total size of the channel cannot be changed after open we recommend channels 1,000,000 and above due to the volatile nature of on chain fee rates also keep in mind that there is a channel reserve of 1% for example, if you have a 500,000sat channel, you cannot spend until at least 5,000 sats are on your side (outbound) for the 1% reserve requirement what happens to my sats if i close a channel? if a channel is closed, your outbound balance (the side of the channel that is yours) will go back to the on chain wallet of your lightning node automatically from there you can open a channel with those funds or send them off the node force closes should never be picked as a close option unless your peer has been offline for a very long time, which should rarely, if ever happen how should i handle on chain fees when interacting with channel opens and closes? auto on thunderhub works fairly well you can set whatever feerate you want depending on your time preference you can use sites such as mempool space to see how the current environment looks we reccomend not setting your on chain fee too low as you risk having to wait for a very long time when making a lightning payment, what does "max fee" mean? and what is a max path? a higher max fee setting opens more paths for the payment to succeed if you set max fee to 1, then you are telling the network "i want to make this payment but i do not want to pay a routing fee higher than 1 sat " the higher routing fee you are willing to pay, the greater chance of success as for max paths, that is the amount of paths to the final destination that you want the node to try to use the more max paths, the more likely the payment is to succeed setting this higher than 10 is usually not necessary what do i do if my admin macaroon is compromised? immediately stop your node (do not delete it) and contact voltage support here