Implications of Bitcoin Dust on Lightning Channels

By Vladimir Fomene

I'm taking you on a debugging journey where we will be learning about Bitcoin dust, how it is calculated and its implication for the Lightning network. Before we dive into the meat of the subject, let me set the stage. This week while trying to open a payment channel from an LDK node to an LND node setup in Polar, I had the following error:

Channel <channelID> closed due to processingError
{ err: "dust_limit_satoshis (573) is greater than the implementation limit (546)" }

On seeing this error, I was intrigued. What is the meaning of dust? What does the dust_limit_satoshis represent in Lightning? Why is the dust_limit_satoshis 573 and why is the implementation limit 546. How are these calculated?

What is dust, how does it come about and what does it represent? Follow Vladimir here https://www.vladimirfomene.com/blog/implications-of-bitcoin-dust-on-lightning/ as he answers these questions.