c-lightning channel announcement/establishment issue

Question

I've been running a c-lightning node over Tor with 2 open channel for a few months and it still hasn't forwarded any payment. Maybe it's normal due to the low amount of liquidity provided by my node, but I noticed my channels status shows this log:

CHANNELD_NORMAL:Funding transaction locked. They need our announcement signatures.

To me it appears like my channels haven't been publicly announced yet. This is my config file:

network=bitcoin
alias=******
rgb=******
bitcoin-rpcuser=bitcoin
bitcoin-rpcpassword=******
bitcoin-rpcconnect=127.0.0.1
bitcoin-rpcport=8332
announce-addr=******.onion
bind-addr=127.0.0.1:9735
proxy=127.0.0.1:9050
daemon
log-level=debug
log-file=/home/bitcoin/.lightning/debug.log

Am I missing anything?

Answer 1

I've been running a c-lightning node over Tor with 2 open channel for a few months and it still hasn't forwarded any payment.

With two channels that's not surprising.

but I noticed my channels status shows this log:

CHANNELD_NORMAL:Funding transaction locked. They need our announcement signatures.

The announcement signatures are retransmitted upon reconnection, you could try to restart your node.

Simple test to check that your announcement propagated : check on an explorer (1) if your node appears. If it does, then you node is publicly announced and you not forwarding payment is just because of a lack of liquidity (or fees !) :p.

(1) Here are some explorers :

• https://lightning.chaintools.io/
• https://ln.bigsun.xyz/
• https://explorer.acinq.co/n/
• https://explore.casa/nodes/
• https://1ml.com/node/

Answer 2

When the channel is opened the opening side of the channel chooses if the channel should be private or announced. Well actually the other side can also choose not to accept public channels. Maybe that has happened with both of your channels. From the information you have we can only guess / speculate. If you want to you can try to open a channel with my node (details at https://ln.rene-pickhardt.de - the node does not speak tor tough) but I could look in my logs if necessary and we could together debug what is going on.