I started to track my balance on my Umbrel node so I could see how much channel opening was costing and how much I was making from routing. I just barely started and there is already a discrepancy.
Last night I opened a channel with someone. I was able to set the fee to 1 since traffic was low, so it only cost 154 sats according to mempool. It was a triangle swap, and both other participants set fees to zero and I rebalanced the channels, which shows as having zero fees.
I went and recorded my balances this morning and I am down 814 sats. Where could the other 660 sats gone? I have not had any other activity besides this channel opening and rebalance.
If you can’t answer that maybe you can answer this:
I open a channel for 1 million sats. 1,000,154 sats leave my wallet (154 for on-chain fee). A channel is opened and the balance is 996,530 sats. Where are the other 3,470 sats?
Use Thunderhub and/or RTL app for managing your LN node/channels. You will find there more details about channels.
You should start reading more documentation about how LN works. We’ve put together a large list of resources TO BE READ:
Linking to a bunch of generic guides is not helpful, many of which I have already read or watched. I understand that you want to encourage people to find answers on their own, Darth, but I find your style of “help” very unwelcoming and borderline militant at times.
Since my last post my node has done one forward and my lightning balance dropped by 330 sats. Help me understand! I would like to find the answer myself, but there are like a hundred links within those guides you posted.
A bit more info: I forwarded 100k sats that came in and left from channels I have set to zero fees. The two channels had no local (inbound) and no remote balances (outbound) before this if that matters. Nothing else has happened since the last time I recorded my balances. Where could those 330 sats have gone?
Those are not “generic” guides. Are exactly the sources from where I learned too. With patience and testing a lot.
What you want is a shortcut, but that will not help you in any way if you do not understand the base.
If you keep refusing to learn the base, you will always have issues and frustrations that you will never understand. I gave you the right information but nobody is here to give free classes about LN.
If users will start by studying all that information everything will go better, but yeah, why bothering to read when you could just ask and not put your brain at work?
And what you ask is more about LN in general and nothing in special about Umbrel.
For anyone that comes along and wants to know the answer. The missing sats are the reserve and the amount may not match up with what Thunderhub says is the reserve (part of why I was confused). When an incoming channel with zero local balance gets some sats on your side, some of them go to the reserve and makes it look like your balance is reduced. They should return when the channel is closed.
Someone somewhere else was kind enough to explain this and not link me to 40 hours of material to sift through. Ok, now I’m gone.
The answer is actually not that just some amount of the reserve isn’t shown. It’s not the reserve at all actually.
The commit fee is what is actually not showing on my balance, but within the commit fee there is also a hidden amount of 660 sats for anchor channels. What exactly is an anchor channel and non-anchor channel I still need to figure out, but the calculation is as follows:
I opened a channel for 1M sats, there is a commit fee of 2810 shown, but I am missing 3470. There are two hidden reserves of 330 sats for the anchor channels, so the total is accounted for.
Meanwhile I had a channel opened to me for whatever amount. There is no local balance yet, so that 330 sat reserve is not yet held back until I receive some sats on my side of the channel at which point they are deducted.
When these channels are closed cooperatively the commit fee and the hidden anchor fee held in reserve are returned and accounted for.