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Is there a tool to identify a Lightning node that will accept a channel open request and that matches the two conditions below?

  • Accepts channel amounts of less than or equal to X.
  • Can route payments, directly or indirectly, to node N.

The scenario is I want to send a small payment to node N but it only accepts new channel requests with amounts much large than X.

My only solution at the moment is to use an explorer to find all the nodes N has channels with and then try creating a channel with each of them for X.

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The mentioned lightning explorers show information from the gossip protocol which nodes usually have copied locally and provide to users. In clightning you can for example access that information with lightning-cli listchannels If I remember correctly in lnd the command is lncli describegraph.

Gossip says a few meta data about what channels nodes accept. however in general a node cannot / will not guarantee that you will be able to route a payment of a particular size to node n (though in practisce it will most likely work)

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    I did try lncli describegraph but it doesn't seem to report any relevant metadata. I guess it wouldn't be that hard to write a script that walks the tree and sends an openchannel request. I was just curious if there was a better way.
    – sipsorcery
    Commented Apr 28, 2021 at 10:13
  • Oh yeah on a protocol message you could actually send an open_channel message to everyone, collect the replies and then abort the protocol so that you would never have to write something to the chain before selecting your future channel partner. This will not solve your routing issue though but very good idea indeed
    – Rene Pickhardt
    Commented Apr 28, 2021 at 11:06

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