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ACINQ / eclair-mobile

An Android wallet for the Lightning Network
Apache License 2.0
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[question] does eclair mobile accept incoming channels ? #154

Open enorrmann opened 5 years ago

enorrmann commented 5 years ago

I'm testing eclair mobile with a local lnd testnet node .. I can open a channel and connect from eclair app to my lnd node but if I try to open a channel with eclair's node id from lnd side, I can not connect .. is this a bug or it is just the correct bahaviour ?

sstone commented 5 years ago

It depends if your mobile phone already has an active channel with your other node or not.

In general, your mobile IP address will change very often and your phone will be offline very often, so all mobile channels are private (not advertised) and opening a channel to a mobile phone does not make much sense.

But if your phone already has a channel to a LN node, then that node knows how to reach it and should be able to open a channel to it by just reusing the same underlying connection. Both channels (mobile -> lnd and lnd -> mobile) will be offline and online at the same time: as soon as your mobile reconnects, your lnd node knows how to reach it and should also restore the channel that it created.

For example this is something that we use provide inbound liquidity to mobile users and enable them to receive funds: you open a channel to us and we open a channel back to you.

enorrmann commented 5 years ago

For example this is something that we use provide inbound liquidity to mobile users and enable them to receive funds: you open a channel to us and we open a channel back to you.

This is exactly what I was trying to do, but without having to open a channel from the app side, or even to fund the eclair wallet first.

and opening a channel to a mobile phone does not make much sense.

I think this makes sense if the user is new to the btc world and only wants to try to make some payments using this wallet. In this case, somebody can "sell" a pre-funded channel to the eclair wallet, with balance on both sides.

It is like acinq's "sell liquidity" feature, but without having to open a channel first.

Perhaps from the eclair side user can "connect" to a node without having to open a channel first. So in this way the node will know where to open the pre-funded channel.

Also, I've found some similar functionality in the Bitrefill's "buy inbound channel", that works with lightning-wallet .. but in this case, you can only buy a channel with inbound capacity, but no local balance to spend.

I want to combine the best of that two features into a single "buy a channel with balance on both sides".. if that makes sense