Dual funding and splicing mechanisms allow initial negotiations between node to allow the node on the other end an opportunity to put funds at channel opening time or after it. Finding liquidity is a problem that had solutions suggested all the way back in November, the suggestion was, in summary, that a node will advertise initial liquidity matching via their node_announcement, this is meant to help these nodes source inbound capacity from a market of advertised liquidity rates as set by other nodes.

After a recent spec meeting, developer Rene Pickhardt noticed a potential privacy issue with this schema: a node can spam another probing for a lower bound for the amount of BTC available by this node, each time aborting the channel establishing before locking any of its own Bitcoin.

Annotated notes from Let’s Talk Bitcoin Episode 389. Taken from Professor Meow on Twitter.

@TheLTBNetwork Episode 389 annotated: Lightning Network Part. 1@aantonop: [SPLICING] is probably one of the most powerful and underappreciated features.

Full episode HERE: https://t.co/7lvFcyH0Bf 🔥🔥🔥

— Humble.Meow (@ProfessorMeo_w) February 24, 2019

I have been visiting Berlin to attend the second lightninghackday and want to give a brief wrap up about the event. This article will basically cover two topics. 1st as promised within my bar camp session on “Building an automated topology for autopilot features of the lightning network nodes” I will give an extensive protocol / summary of the session itself. 2nd I will talk about an already well known technique called splicing which I realized during the event might be one of the more important yet unimplemented features of lightning nodes.