Accept donations in Bitcoin lightning

[makeasnek]

Problem Statement

I am unable to donate to this project with Bitcoin, I will gladly be your first donor!

❔ Possible Solution

Accept Bitcoin.

Reasons to accept Bitcoin:

• Unlike Github sponsors, there is no fee for you to receive it.
• Unlike Github sponsors, Bitcoin works in every country globally and enables anonymous donations
• Many OSS projects accept Bitcoin. For example, Linux mint accepts it and receives donations regularly https://www.blockonomics.co/#/search?q=13JszmQDACVvb6XxPwEb1TzzCyoooQ9WKH https://linuxmint.com/donors.php
• Bitcoin is widely used with a $1 trillion market cap, bigger than the GDP of Sweden.

There are two ways to accept Bitcoin: "main chain" and lightning. Main chain donations are the easiest to accept, but are slower and come with higher fees. Lightning donations settle instantly for <1% fee and therefore are better for smaller donations. The majority of Bitcoin transactions occur through lightning.

Easiest way to accept donations: sign up for an account at strike.me, which works in over 50 countries. It will give you a "lightning address" that looks like [email protected]. Anybody can send lightning transactions to this address. You can then also instantly convert donations into your currency of choice and deposit them into your bank account. It will also provide you a traditional on-chain address you can post for people to donate to.

If you prefer a self-custody wallet, using lightning is slightly more complicated. For main-chain transactions, it is dead simple, pick a well-known Bitcoin wallet and it will provide you with an on-chain address to use. For lightning, you must first open a lightning channel. The size of the channel determines how much you can receive before you must "empty" the channel to make room for more donations. The flow works like this:
0. Download a lightning wallet, like Zeus (Android and iPhone)

1. Open lightning channel with an amount of money, such as $50, costs one on-chain tx which is around $1.50. This means you will have a lightning channel with ~$48.50 in it. You can send $48.50 anywhere you want, but there's no room to receive anything!
2. Send that money back to yourself over lightning using a swap-out service like https://boltz.exchange/. The swap-out service will make a main-chain transaction and send you the money for a small fee, so you will receive approximately $46. You can also send money to yourself over lightning if you have an exchange account (like at strike), this achieves the same result minus the fees.
3. Your lightning channel is now "empty" and can receive up to $48.50 in donations.
4. When the channel fills up with donations, swap it out again. As you can see, if you receive many donations, you may want to make a bigger channel than $50.

[github-actions]

Thank you very much for opening up this issue! I am currently a bit overwhelmed by the many requests that arrive each week, so please forgive me, if I fail to respond personally. I am still very likely to at least skim read your request and I'll probably try to fix all (real) bugs if possible and I will likely review every single PR being made (please, give me a heads up if you intent to do so) and I will try to work on popular requests (please upvote via thumbs up on the original issue) whenever possible, but trying to respond to every single issue over the last years has been kind of draining and I need to adjust my approach for this project to remain fun for me and to make any progress with actually coding new stuff. Thanks for your understanding!

[github-actions]

Hello there makeasnek! 👋

Thank you and congratulations 🎉 for opening your very first issue in this project! 💖

In case you want to claim this issue, please comment down below! We will try to get back to you as soon as we can. 👀

For more open ended discussions and/or specific questions, please visit the discussions page. 💖

[tegridyfarmer]

Since this project has a privacy first mindset adding a wallet for Monero would also make sense. And I would also add Bitcoin since it has a big user base, even though it is not as private.