Opening channels

Add Liquidity

Generate a Lightning wallet and add some funds so that you can open channels. Keep in mind that PLEBNET prefers girthy channels, so fund your node accordingly.

Find Nodes in PLEBNET Telegram Group

If you’re not yet able or willing to offer girthy channels and just want to get started with a smaller amount of sats, Turgidson is for PLEBNET newbies and will accept channels as low as 20k.

You may want to check out Lightning Routing: The First 30 Days to get some ideas

Otherwise, you’ll need to find some other nodes in PLEBNET to open channels with.

You can go to http://graph.plebnet.org/ to see the current visual graph of nodes, or type /graph@cheeserobot group in the PLEBNET chat. /groupnodes@cheeserobot will output a list of the 50 most recent members and nodes. You can contact plebs form the graph or list and see if they’d like to open a channel.

You can also just ask in the PLEBNET channel if anyone is interested in opening a channel with you.

Other Channel Sources

For a two way routing, required to both send and receive sats, you need a good balance of inbound and outbound liquidity. Most new node runners end up with a lot of outbound liquidity because they are the ones opening channels. Here is how you can get some inbound liquidity:

Make a payment to someone, buy something from a merchant, make a donation to a charity or project which accepts lightning payment. All of these will move sats from your local to remote and you will naturally get a balanced channel.
Lightning Network Plus - to create swaps with other node runners. You open a channel to someone and someone else opens a channel to you. You can make a triangle, square, pentagon.
Get a balanced channel from ln2me - you open a channel to them and move sats to them (this is an element of trust). After the channel is opened, they pay you back on-chain. It is an implementation of GSS (see blow)
Buying from LNBIG with Umbrel - you pay for the inbound liquidity. This can be expensive but is usually a popular route.
Ring of Fire - Another swap service similar to LN+
Lightning Conductor - They open channel back to you if you open 500K channel to them.
Umbrel Opening Channel Requests
You can make a payment to your own custodial wallet like WoS, Strike, Munn, Breeze or other swap sites you trust and then you can withdraw BTC on-chain from these wallets. The cost varies a lot and you need to do your research.
LOOP out. This is a trustless service to send payment on lightning and receiving on-chain. It can cost a lot and you may have to make a lot of attempts before you get a route.
You can ask on plebnet for plebs to open a channel to you. You can offer to rebalance or cover their costs.
You can pay someone to open a channel to you on services like [ https://kriptode.com/satsforlikes/index.html sats4like]

Keep It Girthy

It’s best to have fewer big channels with more sats than it is to have many smaller ones. The recommended minimum channel size is 2 million sats, which would be 1 million per node on the channel.

Balanced Channels

The idea is to have balanced channels. This means that there is an equal amount of sats between each node on the channel.

For example, if Node A opens a channel with Node B for 2m sats, it will start entirely on their end. Node A will want to find a way to have 1m sats on each side of the channel.

There are several different ways to accomplish this.

“Girthy (formerly known as Ghetto) Submarine Swap” (aka: ‘trust-required’ dual-funded channel)

ONLY DO THIS WITH ESTABLISHED AND TRUSTED PLEBNET NODES! IT IS POSSIBLE TO LOSE SATS DOING THIS.

Node A opens a channel with X sats.
Node B sends a Lightning invoice for half of the amount X sats that was opened on the channel
The Node A operator sends the address of their preferred on-chain Bitcoin wallet to the operator of Node B
The Node B operator sends half of the amount X sats of the opened channel to the Bitcoin wallet of the operator of Node A from step 3
Node A pays the Lightning invoice

In some other versions, the swap is executed as below

you agree with NODE B you trust to open a 2X channel and at the time of open you push X towards them (i.e you gift them X on LN)
In return NODE B pay X back to you at your on-chain address. (this is based on trust. Usually, people are honourable because they don't want to spoil their reputation for a few dollars but you never know).
End result you have a 2X channel with X local X remote. And you have X on-chain to open another channel.

MEG (aka: ‘trustless’ dual-funded channel) - Mutually Exchanged Girth

Alex Bosworth’s CLI tool, Balance of Satoshis utilizes keysend to add this functionality to LND (which does not natively support it, yet)

Here’s a high-level overview. NOTE: this is an advanced technique, and requires familiarity with terminal. It is safe/legit, but the UX is rough. If you mess it up, bad things could happen. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

Pre-req:  make sure NODE 1 and NODE 2 have keysend enabled (this is default for Umbrel) and at least 1 channel already establish to integrate you into the lightning network (you need a path out for keysend to new peering node for whole process to work)

(NODE 1: Alice)
(0) Run: bos open-balanced-channel
(1) enter remote node public key
(2) enter full channel size
(3) enter fee rate
Open a new terminal window.
(4) Run: bos fund --fee-rate <fee> <address> <amount in sats>  
Copy the signed_transaction and go back to 1st window and paste
(5) paste the signed_transaction to bos prompt in 1st window


(NODE 2: Bob)
(0) Run: bos open-balanced-channel (it should see the request from node1 at this point)
(1) agree with funding rate (y/n)
Open a new terminal window.
(2) Run: bos fund --fee-rate <fee> <address> <amount in sats&gt --dryrun;   
Copy the signed_transaction and go back to 1st window and paste  
(3) paste the signed_transaction to bos prompt in 1st window
(4) hit enter and this should work.

check via: lncli pendingchannels
 
Reference video: https://tube.hordearii.fr/videos/watch/318df0b9-8d27-4ac3-ae0c-7a85a1c76bce