BTCpay Server
We have a lightning network node on a VPS running BTCpay server. This is good for the satoshihost payments and should work well for the crowdfunding parts of directsponsor.
If we use docker install and have difficulty with mail, this might help . https://hub.docker.com/r/citizen010/postfix
Channels
We have one channel incoming from coincept.com/ – this cost about 10 dollars to set up and may continue if it remains active. It seems to be adequate for us to accept incoming payments. We would need to keep an eye on it and send sats out whenever the capacity is getting used up. If it does get cancelled it may be worth contacting them to see if they will keep it active in return for advertising them. Others might be worth approaching as well/instead, such as coinos.io
Issue commands to the node
(maybe)
First cd to /btcpayserver-docker
./bitcoin-lightning-cli.sh getinfoElectrum Sync issues
Electrum and other wallets other then full nodes will restrict the gap limit which means e.g. at 20 it will ignore any more than 20 addresses with no balance, so if we have btcpay generate more than 20 outstanding invoices they will not show in electrum. Increasing the gap limit in electrum will solve this. We also need to increase the change address gap limit,
I have done this and currenly it’s set to 100. Need to keep an eye on things and increase it again if it gets high. In the electrum console:
Check gap limits:
wallet.gap_limit
wallet.gap_limit_for_changeTo change gap limits
wallet.change_gap_limit(100)
wallet.gap_limit_for_change = 100
wallet.synchronize()LNBank
Create lightning wallets on our node that our users can use. Plugin for btcpay – https://coincharge.io/en/lnbank/
lnbits does this as well and a lot more,
https://lnbits.com/
Caution: The control freaks will likely force everyone providing any kind of custodial wallet to implement KYC at least, and who knows what other impositions. So perhaps we should be trying to offer fewer things, not more… Anyway, the choice is there. “Be your own bank” is kind of incompatible with being someone else’s bank, even though this is how the features are touted.
Automation
Pull Payments – regular subscriptions for sponsors
Full details here, should be able to use this I think. There’s also a github thread about recurring payment requests so in time there might be a simpler way. And pull payments seem to be designed more for someone to pay loads of people all at once easily, rather than to “pull” regular payments, so it may not be useful to us. As usual the only way to be sure is to try it, cos the info I found so far is unclear if it would work to do what we need, whereas the github request is for exactly what we need.
redundant below
BTCpay contains a node and has many other things we could use in the future too. It includes a BTC node and lightning. Got it running on a Pi but not sure its a good idea to run a btc node without having a good knowledge of server security.
API details here. Probably best to host it on a VPS anyway, when we are sure of the expertise.
https://docs.btcpayserver.org/deployment/raspberrypideployment
