In this article i am showing you a group channel opening we just did. This is a real example with real funds. The goal of this operation is to open 2 balanced channels with 3 peers cooperating on this procedure.
We chose an amount of 4M satoshis. Here below the most important infos:
- Group Size: 3 nodes
- Amount: 4M meaning that each participant must have 4,150 M satoshis at disposal. So 150k sats more.
- Balance of Satoshi version 13.1.7 or higher
One of the nodes acts as coordinator and creates the group channel open procedure.
We asked what are the benefits of such open?
i think trying to save money on chain fees and also maximize privacy are kind of goals at odds with each other. But the group open privacy could probably be improved in various ways.
The thing that may be obscured is the source of funds for the channel since bitcoin does not explicitly tie inputs to outputs. The change isn’t obscured because you can do simple arithmetic to see whose change it is. The outputs are obscured from the inputs because they’re all the same size. The change isn’t obscured because its amount gives away which input it’s correlated to
Alex Bosworth
Benefits we can get are also: save on-chain fees, to further decentralize the network by making it affordable for small nodes to take part. Moreover anyone gets inbound and outbound liquidity automatically when the channels get open.
Another important aspect, on my idea, is the fact that many people are not usual to deal with lightning and nodes. For these people it can be a nice help to have a coordinator being able to coordinate a multiple channel open for them. As told above, this may incentivize adoption and node runners and therefore decentralization.
Totally we spent: 4,000,204 Sats and we got the 2 channels perfectly balanced already. This was a great result. If you want to check out the transaction on an explorer, the transaction id of this transaction is:
51412134ada21442d6139ace2d655f4aa1330c5a7e7b02bd207b4da4046794c4
