I've used Electrum quite a bit, i know about the ETA, mempool and static fees... However, I'm talking upon closing the channel, i picked the "close channel" (not force close) which in description says that it has lower fees, and was immediately charged 507 sats, even though mempool was around 40 sats at that moment, there was no disclaimer, notification, option... nothing. Incredibly scammy, I don't care about "it's multiplied by this that and the other" it's a scam, if i knew that i would have to pay 20€ to close unused lightning channel i wouldn't close it.

I've opened the channel when the mempool blocks were cca 50 vbyte, and closed it later that day when it was 35-40 vbytes per block.

Electrum decided that it's 507 vbytes because multiplying reasons... Anyways, I've moved from Electrum, and I advise others to do so. If an average user should spend their day reading github to open/close channel, then it is a failed experiment.
(and no they don't warn you regarding the insane fee upon closing the channel)

I only struggle to realize the point of the lightning if:
- It's not meant to be used with such small transactions or channels, that's the point of lightning.
- It's fees tend to be higher than on-chain transactions (except if you have 200 transactions per channel then maybe yes). Because for the amount I payed here, I could've sent many on-chain transactions with no hassle. (I've made 0 transactions other than opening/closing channel).

Also what's the point of saying that minimal channel capacity is 2mBTC if it's often impossible to use the channel with such small capacity? (since we have Ordinals now - I guess it will be impossible to use from now on). Which again brings me to the first point, which is "If i have to put a lot of money in a single Lightning channel, what's the point of lightning network when the purpose of lightning are payments equivalent of $5-$10? To save on fees? How If the channel creator will be charged heavily with unpredictable fee-spikes that are doubled... or tripled or whatever.

I know that I'm speaking in layman's terms, but it's so misleading and user unfriendly, it's killing the purpose of lightning when you are better of (and more secure) paying on chain even with higher fees. Electrum will end up being only used by small-group of tech savvy individuals, average bitcoiner shouldn't go through all that.

Hi all,

I'm new here. I've used electrum in the past, but I wanted to setup lightning wallet so i can transfer btc from exchange to electrum without paying the high fees...

Firstly, I've had to fund the channel with 0.002BTC to open a channel, and I did. Since I don't know much about Lightning I wanted to experiment using all default settings in electrum which is creating a Electrum Trampoline channel. After paying pretty high fee (around 10€) I've finally created channel and it was open, kangaroo icon, (tried disabling gossip too), everything looked fine, except the next part: My channel capacity was 0.002btc but i could send 0 btc and receive 0 btc.

Like I've said, i've tried reconnecting, disabling trampoline, waiting for lightning icon to go up to 100%... but still nothing. I've hopped onto reddit and saw that other people are experiencing the same issue, so i decided that it is too much hassle and tried to close the channel.

There was force close option, and close option, i picked the latter because it said that the fees are lower that way. Only to immediately find out that Electrum placed a fee of 507 sats/byte which was around 20€... I immediately looked onto mempool, and saw that all blocks (new and past blocks) are around 40 sats/byte.

So not only that i payed over 30€ in fees in total - but the channel didn't work. Ok you can argue that maybe i've setuped something wrong (even though i've followed the setup from popular bitcoin talk post as is), but what's with the insanely high fees? And why does Electrum pick the insanely high fee without noticing or asking me first?

I'm beyond pissed, because I've lost so much money recently, and just when i thought "ok i will learn lightning to avoid loosing money" - I lost again! Really frustrating, and scammy, again, current mempool blocks are around 40-50 sats not 508!


https://ibb.co/7RcfHKx