After the transaction is broadcast on chain, the payment channel is open and ready for transfers. When one wishes to update the balance with a new balance, both parties must consent to the new balance and generate a new spend from the transaction. In effect, they have created numerous "double spends" from an on blockchain transaction, but have elected not to broadcast the spend until either party wants to redeem their funds on chain. These multi signature transactions are real Bitcoin transactions. Either party may broadcast the most recent transaction, the current local consensus state, to the global blockchain at any time to redeem their current balance of funds. As either party may redeem funds from this channel at any time unilaterally, without requiring any cooperation from anyone else, the most recent transaction is effectively their current balance in the channel. They may continue updating the channel with updated states without interacting with the global blockchain until they wish to close out the channel. In other words, updating the local consensus state is actionable on the global consensus state.