We used to have our node open to anyone's channels!
The problem was that we would have some peers use us as a high-throughput routing node, depleting all liquidity fast. External peers constantly unbalanced channels, worsening Muun users' experience.
For that reason, we decided to optimize for Muun users' payment reliability, and restricted who could open channels to us.
Notice that having a direct connection from your node to ours doesn't lower the costs much. If your node were directly connected to ours, the payment route from your node to a Muun user would be {your node} ---> {muun's node} ---> {muun phone wallet}. Providing inbound liquidity for the last hop is what has really high financial costs, because Muun has to lock its own funds in advance.
Ok, here's where my understanding of the inner workings of muun might be lacking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought there were no channels in a muun wallet and that everything were just UTXO's in my wallet. From what I understood muun's interoperability with the LN was just that, interoperability, supported by submarine swaps.
Now if you say there's muun's capital locked between {muun's node} and {muun phone wallet} then this truly sounds more like a channel. Do you for instance keep a commitment (refund) transaction and might deploy it to get your capital back in case the user becomes unresponsive?
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