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When opening channels, make the failures visible
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PolarisOct 4, 2026
Opening channels (on-chain) in Alby is quite difficult because most of the time the opening requests just fail silently: sometimes there is a very ephemeral popup that tells why the channel can't be opened, but then that message just disappears into a void. Most of the time not even an ephemeral message is shown: the channel opening just fails, silently, and no record whatsoever is shown on which channels the user has even tried to open and why they failed. Why are the failures not visible, so users could have some idea what to do next?
Kommentare
That's the thing - I spent an hour yesterday trying to open a channel with just any channel partner for a channel size somewhere between 1,5M and 10M sats, and finding a channel partner that accepts channels at this size seemed to be nearly impossible. I tried just finding channel partners on random websites, did trial and error, with zero luck. Had to open a smaller channel than what I wanted in the end. If the silent fails weren't a problem, I could easily answer your question, because I could see which partners I tried, at which amounts, and their reason for refusal, so where can I see that list? If there is no such list, instead of fumbling in the dark, wouldn't it be like really, really useful to have one?
Polaris
So we are talking about a channel that you open with your on-chain BTC from your Hub to another node?
Alby Hub gives you a list of channel partners with their minimum channel amounts. Why didn't you use that? Didn't you find it?
Moritz Yes, I tried all of them. Out of that list, Acinq is the only one that seems to allow channel sizes over 1.5M sats, and on that day even Acinq was refusing the channel - and again, the problem here is that it was quite difficult to figure out why as the error messages are not being shown. That situation then led me to have to try to seek out random channel partners, which again was quite difficult as most seem to be require channels of at least 10M sats, and I can't find any logs or list of channels that have failed to open. I think having that would be quite helpful, and easy to implement?
Polaris Thanks for the clarification. Indeed many channel partner require higher minimum channel capacities.
That's why Alby Hub offers this list vetted channel partners so that you don't have to search.
You should see failures in your app logs if you the default Alby Hub with the integrated LDK node.
Alby Hub -> Settings -> Debug Tools -> App Logs -> when you send it to support@getalby.com, we'll take a look.
Opening channels (on-chain) in Alby is quite difficult because most of the time the opening requests just fail silently. -> That may not be the case.
Could you please describe to which channel partner your are opening a channel?
Or from which channel partner are you buying a channel from?