19th August 2024

Closing remotely opened channels

I do not like closing channels that are opened to me by peers, but today I am closing two channels which were opened to me about one month ago. Mempool fees are low today, so it will not cost my peers a lot. Both peers are tor only with no contact info in their Amboss entry, so I will post my reasons here:

* There was no organic routing happening from these two peers to me.

* I had to set very high outbound fees towards these peers to stop a stream of failed outgoing HTLCs due to the zero balance on my side. This raised my average outgoing fee level, which I like to keep low.

* Even though the incoming fees for these channels were low, I was not able to rebalance the channels within reasonable expense limits. The channels were on the larger side for my small node, which affected my node’s overall inbound/outgoing balance.