Let me add some more color to the discussion. If you do not announce the existence of the channel to the wider network you can still receive incoming payments, by simply telling the payment sender about the channel. This is what is being done in the payment request by adding the `r` parameter to the request. You are selectively informing the sender about the channel, which can then use that information to construct the route (and onion packet) and initiate the payment.
Even though you have only one channel, and announce it, people might still want to route through you, by using the channel twice: once to route to you and then back out from you. While this may seem wasteful, it may be useful to hide the real origin/destination of the payment. Another scenario for which this is useful is that you are an auditor that witnesses the payment while it is being processed, for book keeping or similar cases. This would also work for unannounced channels. So the decision whether to announce a channel is exactly what you're looking for. It allows you to do bidirectional payments, and does not allow random people to route through you. Implementations might eventually add an "endpoint mode" that rejects any HTLC for which the node is not the origin or the destination, which would further enforce this. Cheers, Christian _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev