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Fun with opening channels and paying invoices

  • In this section we open channels with our fellow mutinynet lightning node operators and send each other off-chain mutinysats!

Exercise: Open channels and pay invoices

Grab some free sats from the faucet​

  • First, generate a new wallet address so you can deposit some sats on your node:
lightning-cli newaddr

Copy your deposit address and paste it into https://faucet.mutinynet.com to receive some free mutinynet sats!

Get your node URI and announce it to your peers​

To get your node URI, first enter:

lightning-cli getinfo
  • Your node URI looks like <pubkey or node ID>@<IP or hostname>:<port> (the port is usually optional, though you'll want to include it for this exercise).
  • Share this URI with your peers!

Connect to some peers​

  • Once you've announced your URI to everyone, anyone can connect to your node (and you to them) by entering:
lightning-cli connect <URI>

(a.k.a. lightning-cli connect <pubkey>@<IP>:9735)

  • Connect to a handful of peers. You will be transacting with them shortly.

Open some channels​

  • See all the peers you have by running lightning-cli listpeers | jq -r '.peers[] | .id, .netaddr[0]'
  • Once you have some peers, you can open channels to them with lightning-cli fundchannel <pubkey> <amount>. The amount field can be specified as a number of sats by appending sat to the end of the sat amount you want to open the channel for. So, for example lightning-cli fundchannel 260a95d3d46afbca770cff6890 1000000sat (to open a 1-million-sat channel).
  • Once you have some channels, now the real fun begins!

Creating and paying invoices​

  • Make an invoice for 1,000 sats and send it to anyone!
lightning-cli invoice 1000sat test test

then copy and paste the bolt11 field to the payer.

  • Pay invoices with:
lightning-cli pay <their bolt11>

Keep it rolling​

  • Keep creating payments and sending them until you're satisfied.
  • Keep track of your on-chain and channel balances with lightning-cli bkpr-listbalances
  • You can also use lightning-cli summary to see a nice little ASCII depiction of your node

If there's still time left in the workshop, let's do some bonus stuff!

  • Grab some free sats from the mutinynet faucet
  • Connect to some peers
  • Open some channels
  • Make some invoices
  • Pay some invoices
  • Look at your node's bookkeeper balance and summary