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by throwaway405769 1652 days ago
No, that's not how LN works. If the other party suddenly closes the channel at an old state that is beneficial to them, the funds will get locked for 2 weeks and you will have enough time to publish a transaction with a more recent state, which will reward you with whole balance of the channel [0].

[0] https://blog.bitmex.com/lightning-network-justice/

1 comments

As that article explains, that only works if the non-closing node notices the problem in time to contest this. And, according to your article, this period is 24h, not 2 weeks.

I'd also note that this seems to make DoS much worse of a problem. If I have a transaction with a node that has gone offline and can't be reached, and I initiate a forced closure, what's to stop the other node from taking all the money in the channel, especially if I am not constantly online and the channel state I can't know for sure if the other node may have made some transactions while I was away?