LND Inbound Liquidity Problems -- Not Enough to Receive

The Problem

Your channel has funds on your side (outbound) but no capacity to receive (inbound). Payments sent to you fail with "insufficient inbound capacity" or similar errors.

Check Current Inbound Capacity

lncli listchannels | grep -E "remote_balance|chan_id"

remote_balance is your inbound capacity per channel.

Solutions

1. Spend Outbound (Easiest)

Make outgoing payments. Every sat you spend moves liquidity to the other side, increasing your inbound.

2. Circular Rebalancing

# With bos
bos rebalance --in <inbound_channel_id> --out <outbound_channel_id>

# Or with lncli (manual)
lncli buildroute --amt <sats> --hops <peer1,peer2,...,yourself>

3. Lightning Loop (Loop In)

loop in --amt 500000
# Moves on-chain BTC into channel as inbound capacity

4. Receive via New Channel

Ask a peer to open a channel TO you. They provide the initial inbound liquidity. Services like Lightning Network+ or Bitrefill Thor can do this for a fee.

5. Dual-Funded Channels (LND 0.17+)

lncli openchannel --node_key <peer> --local_amt 1000000 --fund_max
# Both sides contribute — you get inbound immediately

Prevention

Keep channels balanced. If a channel is 90%+ outbound, rebalance before you need inbound urgently.

Key Metric to Watch

lncli channelbalance
# Shows total local vs remote balance across all channels