From dave at dtrt.org Wed Apr 28 20:14:38 2021 From: dave at dtrt.org (David A. Harding) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 10:14:38 -1000 Subject: [Lightning-dev] Recovery of Lightning channels without backups In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20210428201438.a2xa57hlqmfhqeor@ganymede> On Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 11:32:27AM +1100, Lloyd Fournier wrote: > I've been considering the problem of recovering lightning channels after > losing channel state in a boating accident. The modern way of doing this > seems to be "static channel backups" -- these are essentially lists of > channel ids and the nodes you had the channels with. > > The idea is that with this backup you can remember who you had channels > with, connect to them and ask them to force close the channel (can someone > link me the concrete protocol messages you send to do this?). > > It occurred to me that if the lightning protocol were changed slightly you > could do this without the channel backup at all. I was re-reading this OP after seeing some of Rusty's concerns later in the thread and I was wondering why we need to alter funding at all. We're assuming that when Alice recovers from her backup, she knows her node_id and has the private key necessary to sign messages for it, so why can't she sign a message that gets gossiped across the network that says, "if you have a channel with node_id 0xa11ce, please close it now"? Maybe the message also includes a signed timestamp or block height so only channels with funding transactions confirmed before that time/height get closed, preventing future replays of the message from closing Alice's later channels opened with the same seed/node_id. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 833 bytes Desc: not available URL: