From 062ded9e6daf5c4a76ab57aaad05391de163050d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?R=C3=A2u=20Cao?=
+ With LND, if the channel is created as an anchor channel (by default only since version 0.12), then the commitment
+ transaction contains small extra outputs (currently 330 sats), which let
+ either channel partner spend one of them into a child transaction that can be
+ created with higher fees to pay for the parent transaction (CPFP). LND even
+ has a built-in command for that: lncli wallet bumpclosefee
+
+ However, this channel was created in the old-school way, and was thus stuck + with its low fee. In fact, even the local bitcoin node refused to accept the + transaction into its own mempool, so the bitcoin p2p network didn't even know + it existed. So how do we get out of this pickle? +
++ Enter the mempool.space Accelerator. It is essentially an automated way to create + agreements with various mining pools to mine your low-fee transaction in + exchange for an out-of-band payment. Mempool.space coordinates these + agreements and out-of-band payments with miners and gets a share from the + overall fee for that. +
++ Now, if you're in the same situation as I was, you might search for the ID of + your closing transaction and find that mempool.space cannot find it. Remember + how the local bitcoin node (with mostly default settings) didn't accept it in + the first place? +
+In your bitcoin.conf
, add the following line:
minrelaytxfee=0
+ This sets the minimum fee to 0, meaning it will accept and broadcast your
+ transactions, no matter how low the fee is. Restart bitcoind
and
+ wait a little bit. LND will retry broadcasting the closing transaction every
+ minute or so until it succeeds. At some point you should be able to find it on
+ mempool.space.
+
+ Once you can see the transaction on mempool.space, you can just click the "Accelerate" button next to the + ETA. This will bring you to a page that shows you the estimated share of + miners that will include your transaction in their blocks, as well as some + acceleration fee options for various transaction fee levels, which you can pay + for via the Lightning Network, of course. +
+
+ If you haven't looked into this service before (which I had), then the fees
+ might be a bit of a surprise to you. This thing is not cheap!
+ Bumping my fee from 1 sat/vB to 9 sats/vB cost a whopping 51,500 sats
+ (31 USD that day). Bumping it higher only seemed to add the difference
+ in the transaction fee itself, so the service seems to have cost a flat 50K
+ sats at the time.
+
+ Unfortunately, this channel wasn't particularly large, so the acceleration fee + amounted to ~9% of my remaining channel balance. But 91% of something is + better than 100% of nothing, so I actually felt pretty good about it. +
+Next, you will see something like this:
+
+
+
+ Time to lean back and let the miners work for you. In my case, the ETA was + eerily precise. It told me that it would take ~56 minutes to confirm the + transaction, and almost exactly an hour later it was mined. +
++ Now that our transaction is confirmed, our channel is not closed immediately, + of course. The time lock of the HTLC protects our channel partner from us broadcasting + an old channel state in which our balance might be higher than in the latest + state. +
++ In my case, it was set to 144 blocks, i.e. ~24 hours. So I checked back the + next day, et voilá: channel closed and balance restored. 🥳 +