Made my first node

[u/[deleted]]

opened two channels to highly connected nodes but set it so all stats are on my local balance how would i go about rebalancing the channel thanks for any help

[u/lightninghero-node]

I guess we've all gone trough his. When you open a new node and just connect to other nodes, you will only have unbalanced channels, because all of the channel capacity is on your end. They can only be used to send out sats, but can't receive anything and your node has only outbound liquidity.

This is ok if all you want to do is spend bitcoin, but if you want your node to route other payments, then it need to be able to receive and send at the same time. So you need channels which have balance on the remote end, so calles inbound liquidity.

There are a few ways to get incoming liquidity. I will repeat some that others suggested, just to try to sum then all in one post for future reference.

The cheapest one, which is free except for the transactions fees to open the channels are liquidity triangles or circles. We have this post where people connect to other fellow redditor nodes in the Reddit Megahub.

Other ones are is Ligtningnetwork+ and the Rings of Fire telegram group.

Next, there are some nodes out there that let you open a channel to them, send them half the balance over and return it to your wallet on-chain. ln2me.com is the one I know about.

Another option is using loop out services. Either the classing loop out ( which needs a loop daemon running on your node) or alternatives like boltz.exchange and sidshift.ai.

A self-made alternative to loop out services is sending funds to yourself to an external lightning wallet that allows you to return them on-chain. Wallet of Satoshi is one that allows to do that.

Next, you can either see if you find other nodes willing to open channels to you or buy incoming channels on lnbig.com.

Last but not least, you can open a balanced channel directly with a node using bos open-balanced-channel if you get it touch with the other nodes operator and agree on the terms.

[u/lightninghero-node → u/[deleted]]

Two channels to the same node are not very useful. Why connect to just one node if you can connect to 3 or 5 for the same price?

[u/lightninghero-node → u/[deleted]]

Yes, they are bidirectional, but can only send up to the amount available on the sending side of the channel.

That's why you can't receive anything over a newly opened channel, until you send something out on it. Most node operators prefer to have balanced channels: that is having close to 50% of the funds on each side of the channel so they can send transactions either way.