Translations:Balancing Nodes/10/en

When node B wants to send some sats to node Y, it can create a route, which could pass via your node M, but if you are not a direct peer of B, Node B would never know how much is on your local balance to send outward towards Y. Node B would have Local/Remote information about channel B->A, but not about Local/Remote balance of A->M, M->Z, Z->Y. Node B would only know the capacity of the channels but not the Local/Remote balance. Node B is the initiator node, it will use its logic to guess and most senders assume the channel has 50% of the capacity available as local.

If the lowest capacity channel in this path is A->M for 1_000_000 Sats, B would assume it can send at least 500_000 Sats + Fees. It will create and HTLC for that amount and pass it on to A, who will pass it on to M keeping the fees for A->M, who will pass it on to Z keeping the fees for M->Z, who will pass it on to Y, keeping the fees for Z->Y. However, if M->Z only has 200_000 sats on local, this HTLC will fail at that point (which you see as

failure: TemporaryChannelFailure at 689892x1307x0 from nofrixion_tokyo

if you run bos rebalance).

If there is no other route, the payment will fail and B can only send 200_000 sats on this route.