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On May 14th our channel with LNBIG-42 was force closed and has only returned to the wallet minus some fees a few days ago.

https://mempool.space/tx/c75f38d1a86b0878d2b38198c17683cd4b6a10e2eea2d031ec085e25d1862149#vout=1

From what others are telling me it was most likely due to an expired HTLC which likely caused the automatic force closure as per the default settings in the relevant lightning implementation.

HTLC relay failure leading to node downtime seems to be the cause, but it is hard to say what specifically about your node setup and channels may have been vulnerable to this situation.

Also mentioned, it is possible the remote channel was misbehaving in some way. This is why until you can be certain that you are avoiding all related vulnerabilities you should not open channels with lots of unknown people especially not with questionable reputation.

Can you please tell me if I can raise the default HTLC settings on my node to hopefully avoid this happening again? Maybe using RTL or Thunderhub? Since it was not our side of the channel that initiated the force close why did we get charged fees?

Thank you for any assistance you are able to offer.

Orange

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HTLC relay failure leading to node downtime seems to be the cause, but it is hard to say what specifically about your node setup and channels may have been vulnerable to this situation.

Maybe yes or maybe no.

Force closes unfortunately happens for a lot of reasons. One of these is a bug in the software or an interop problem between two implementations.

Another reason is a fee spike, I know that ldk closes the channel if the fee is not matched, core lightning disables just the channel.

Now the question is: Is the force close always necessary? Imho no, I do think that we are not mature enough at the protocol level to catch the case that we can recover and try to fix it without going on chain.

But we are currently working on warning messages, where they need some more semantics around, but there is a way to do it

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  • Hi Vincenzopalazzo, Thank you for your reply it is most appreciated. Sorry for the late reply been ill lately but better now. LND will mature with time so patience is a must I see. :)
    – Orange_Bitcoin
    Commented Aug 28, 2023 at 11:34

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