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Sorry for the dumb question, but I'm not very good in lightning network... So I have two daemons: c-lightning and LND.

Channels from the c-lightning comes like this 505580x1917x1; Channels from the LND comes like this 556369376388317185;

Is it possible to bring them to a single format? For example c-lightning convert to simple integer like LND in order to find same channels from both daemons?

Rene Pickhardt
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user1692333
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    In the spec meeting in November it was agreed to make the format of the short channel Id part of the protocol. In future implementations should use the clightning format with `x` as a separator instead of `:` while colon was very readable the short channel ids that use x as a separator are doubleclickable. – Rene Pickhardt Mar 23 '19 at 09:29

2 Answers2

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The specification of the short_channel_id describes the format as follows:

The short_channel_id is the unique description of the funding transaction. It is constructed as follows:

  1. the most significant 3 bytes: indicating the block height
  2. the next 3 bytes: indicating the transaction index within the block
  3. the least significant 2 bytes: indicating the output index that pays to the channel.

Hence to convert between the two formats you can use the following python snippets:

def lnd_to_cl_scid(s):
    block = s >> 40
    tx = s >> 16 & 0xFFFFFF
    output = s  & 0xFFFF
    return (block, tx, output)

def cl_to_lnd_scid(s):
    s = [int(i) for i in s.split('x')]
    return (s[0] << 40) | (s[1] << 16) | s[2]

The reason we (c-lightning) use the dotted format is because it allows us to look up the funding TX without having to do a conversion (and it usually is shorter than the u64 representation)

Rene Pickhardt
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cdecker
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2

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/8379bbaa9b259544c2c8591782a78d7384680b2a/lnwire/short_channel_id.go#L25-L43

// NewShortChanIDFromInt returns a new ShortChannelID which is the decoded
// version of the compact channel ID encoded within the uint64. The format of
// the compact channel ID is as follows: 3 bytes for the block height, 3 bytes
// for the transaction index, and 2 bytes for the output index.
func NewShortChanIDFromInt(chanID uint64) ShortChannelID {
    return ShortChannelID{
        BlockHeight: uint32(chanID >> 40),
        TxIndex:     uint32(chanID>>16) & 0xFFFFFF,
        TxPosition:  uint16(chanID),
    }
}

// ToUint64 converts the ShortChannelID into a compact format encoded within a
// uint64 (8 bytes).
func (c ShortChannelID) ToUint64() uint64 {
    // TODO(roasbeef): explicit error on overflow?
    return ((uint64(c.BlockHeight) << 40) | (uint64(c.TxIndex) << 16) |
        (uint64(c.TxPosition)))
}
Andrey Dzhukov
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