Opening a Channel

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Opening a Channel
with Thunderhub
Opening Your First Channel
Now that you have access to your Thunderhub Dashboard, let's go ahead and open a channel. Before you can open a channel though, you will need to send funds to the on-chain wallet of your Lightning Node. It is from this wallet that funds can be allocated towards Lightning Channels. To do so, click Receive on the on-chain part of your lightning node (the symbol with the anchor means on-chain), and then Create Address.
After you have funds confirmed in your on-chain wallet of your Lightning Node, you can go ahead and open channels.
You will want to choose who to open a channel with and then collect their pubkey and socket. You can get this from a friend or from a Lightning Network public database such as 1ml.com or amboss.space. It will look similar to this: 031[email protected]44.242.118.94:9735 Once you have that information, we can now go to Quick Actions and click Open.
Thunderhub will show you some nodes you can open to, but for now we are going to do it manually. Click Open again.
Is New Peer: We are going to click Yes on this. If you have already connected to them as a Peer you can click No and then select them from the drop down box that appears. A Peer is simply a confirmed connection with another node. This is done simultaneously when opening a channel in this guide. 
All channels are with peers, but you may not have a channel with each of your peers.
New Node: This is where you paste in the [email protected] information from earlier. Remember, it needs three pieces of information: [email protected]/toraddress:port. 
Channel Size: This is the size of the channel and your initial starting funds that will be allocated to the channel. Channel sizes cannot be changed after opening. 
Fee: Typical on-chain fee for the channel open. All channel opens and closes require an on chain transaction. Visit mempool.space to get an idea of current fee rates.
Advanced:
Type: A Public Channel will be able to route external payments across the network, and each forward your node completes will net you a fee. The channel capacity can be seen on network explorers as well as other data. Only the total capacity of the channel will be known to the public. The balance of each side will not be known
A Private Channel cannot route payments for others, and is hidden to the wider network. Only you and your peer can see the channel and balances. You are able to send and receive as normal.
Push Tokens to Partner: This is used if you want to give your peer funds during the Channel Open. For example, if you want to open a 3,000,000 sat channel, and owe your peer 1,000,000 sats, you can push 1,000,000 using this option. The initial channel balance in this example will be 2,000,000 on your side and 1,000,000 on their side. 
After you have completed the inputs, click Open Channel. This will broadcast the channel open to the network and now you will be able to monitor it on a block explorer for confirmations. To do this, click Channels on the menu on the left side. Then in the upper right you will see a button that says Pending. Click this and it will show you your pending open channel along with a TXID you can copy into a block explorer. After six confirmations, your channel will be open for business.
Click Pending to get your TXID
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Starting Thunderhub
Basics of Channel Management
Last modified 13d ago
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