Channel Disappeared

[Mark8673]

Please help, I am a noob and can't figure out why my 500,000sat's are nowhere to be found.

My node pubkey is 02cf138e5dc277f1017d31ac8b661f6034f04fbecd773053e7307fda2dad8a69cd

I opened a channel to lightningconductor.net with Eclair v0.6.2, it said "waiting on funding, confirmed", checked a couple hours later and the transaction was still in the mempool, I increased the transaction fee hoping it would speed up the process and a couple hours after that the channel disappeared from my Eclair window.

Transaction 1 details:

Status: conflicted with a transaction with 33 confirmations
Date: 8/27/2021 12:28
To: bc1ql3l3rny8wp0j09yux42gpcgcj9zdn689yaaxqka2pq52f2ssj4mqyak7k2
Debit: -500 000 sat
Transaction fee: -429 sat
Net amount: -500 429 sat
Transaction ID: 7957b189f8e95dcd335aedb6622174181373affd8806f6a9348ba6cae556f579
Transaction total size: 826 bytes
Transaction virtual size: 424 bytes
Output index: 1

Transaction 2 details with increased transaction fee:

Status: 33 confirmations
Date: 8/27/2021 15:27
To: bc1ql3l3rny8wp0j09yux42gpcgcj9zdn689yaaxqka2pq52f2ssj4mqyak7k2
Debit: -500 000 sat
Transaction fee: -2549 sat
Net amount: -502 549 sat
Transaction ID: 098ca1deb20725b7e880da41a28e9a0fcef216491dc596110b7405a82a3295f1
Transaction total size: 826 bytes
Transaction virtual size: 424 bytes
Output index: 1

I have attached the Eclair log, please tell me how to fix.

Thanks in advance for your help!!!

Mark

eclair.log

[t-bast]

I increased the transaction fee

What do you mean by that? Eclair doesn't let you increase the transaction fee (for very good reasons).
Did you RBF the funding transaction outside of eclair?

[Mark8673]

I am using Eclair in conjunction with Bitcoin Core and upped the transaction fee in Bitcoin Core.

[t-bast]

You must never RBF a funding transaction outside of eclair...you can do CPFP on it, but never RBF.
That broke the channel, and your funds are now in a multisig 2-of-2 output shared between you and lightningconductor.net.

The only way to get the funds out is to contact lightningconductor.net and have them give you their corresponding channel private key. Once you have that, you'll be able to get the channel private key for your side from the eclair DB and manually create a transaction that sends the funds back to your wallet.

[akumaigorodski]

Just curious, how was this possible at all? Channel funding tx has RBF flag disabled so fee bump attempt should have been rejected by nodes right away (?)

[Mark8673]

btcontract, you got me, I'm a noob, I have no idea what I'm doing but was trying to learn more about running a node and the lightning network.

I reached out to lightningconductor.net a couple days ago and again as suggested by t-bast but I have read that they have terrible customer support.... hopefully they read their emails eventually.

[akumaigorodski]

@Mark8673 I'm not accusing you of anything, rather trying to get to the bottom of it. There's always a chance it's not what it seems it is and described situation does look strange because:

• RBFing should not be possible since initial funding tx does not allow it.
• CPFPing should have resulted in normal channel opening.
• Non-RBF replacing is very unlikely to succeed, should have been rejected by all nodes around.

I guess if this is not an issue sharing a funding tx would clarify a lot.

EDIT: there is actually a funding txid, will look at it.

EDIT 2: after looking at it, a confirmed transaction has RBF flag so I assume it was not an actual bumping but you've just extracted a channel "address" (bc1ql3l3rny8wp0j09yux42gpcgcj9zdn689yaaxqka2pq52f2ssj4mqyak7k2) and sent another transaction to it?

[t-bast]

RBFing should not be possible since initial funding tx does not allow it.

This depends on the user's bitcoin core settings (and I suspect by default bitcoin core opts into RBF, as everyone wants to move to a world where all transactions are replaceable - if fee conditions are met).

We don't explicitly tell bitcoind to opt-out, because I believe we can't actually opt-out of inherited signalling regardless of what we ask bitcoind.

So unfortunately funding txs are indeed replaceable, which can bite people who RBF them outside of eclair...
We should update the documentation somewhere to put a big red warning about that.
@Mark8673 what documentation did you read when opening that channel (so that we know where to put that warning)?

By the way you seem to be using the eclair GUI, which has been deprecated for ages (years) and should be used only for prototyping / demo purposes...

[Mark8673]

btcontract, I didn't think you were accusing me of anything, I appreciate all the help I'm given!!

[Mark8673]

t-bast, when I was researching about the different ways to setup a lightning node on a windows machine I came across the website "https://medium.com/@frederikro/setting-up-lightning-with-eclair-from-acinq-on-bitcoin-testnet-on-a-windows-machine-cbbbc41a399e". I am not familiar with Linux and have 3 servers at home running ESXI hosts all connected to Vmware Vsphere so it seemed the easiest for me to run another instance of windows to run the lightning node. I saw that Eclair was just updated in July of this year and it had a GUI (I didn't realize the GUI hadn't been updated in years...) so it seemed like a good fit.

[t-bast]

Unfortunately we can't get people to update old blog posts to add a warning about RBF...

The best we can do here is mention it in our README and in the documentation of the open channel API, but that won't prevent people that do this through a GUI from doing an RBF directly on Bitcoin Core...but it's a start, so I'll add this.

Christian Decker had started drafting a general solution to this kind of issues here, but it didn't get much traction because that's something users very rarely run into.

[t-bast]

@Mark8673 can we close this issue? There isn't much we can here unfortunately...