- /// Used to indicate no further channel monitor updates will be allowed (eg we've moved on to a
- /// different watchtower and cannot update with all watchtowers that were previously informed
- /// of this channel).
+ /// Used to indicate no further channel monitor updates will be allowed (likely a disk failure
+ /// or a remote copy of this [`ChannelMonitor`] is no longer reachable and thus not updatable).
+ ///
+ /// When this is returned, [`ChannelManager`] will force-close the channel but *not* broadcast
+ /// our current commitment transaction. This avoids a dangerous case where a local disk failure
+ /// (e.g. the Linux-default remounting of the disk as read-only) causes [`PermanentFailure`]s
+ /// for all monitor updates. If we were to broadcast our latest commitment transaction and then
+ /// restart, we could end up reading a previous [`ChannelMonitor`] and [`ChannelManager`],
+ /// revoking our now-broadcasted state before seeing it confirm and losing all our funds.
+ ///
+ /// Note that this is somewhat of a tradeoff - if the disk is really gone and we may have lost
+ /// the data permanently, we really should broadcast immediately. If the data can be recovered
+ /// with manual intervention, we'd rather close the channel, rejecting future updates to it,
+ /// and broadcast the latest state only if we have HTLCs to claim which are timing out (which
+ /// we do as long as blocks are connected).