Latest Strikes 14 - Dec. 5th-11th 2022
A new point of sale app linked to Bitcoin Beach Wallet, the winners of the LegendsOfLightning tournament announced, faster, easier and cheaper remittances ... This week in Lightning was, as usual, busy and well-filled. Read further to find out more, and remember: if you want to receive your weekly recap in your inbox before anyone else, all you have to do is subscribe. Ready? Let's dive in!
Wallets & Tools
Cashu In LNBits
Everyone can now easily be their own Chaumian Ecash mint with the integration of Cashu into LNBits.
Having the ability to run a mint inside an LNBits instance makes a lot of sense: the way LNBits works is already custodial, where the money sent to an LNBits instance is actually sent to the Lightning node on top of which the instance runs. LNBits is "just" a toolkit to make it easy for anyone to run their own instance, and provide some Lightning services to others, be they clients, friends, neighbours or family.
With the Cashu plugin, it is now possible to provide an additional service: the added privacy of chaumian e-cash, supercharged by the ability to send funds between mints through the Lightning Network, without any additional risk or trust assumption than those that arise when using someone else's LNBits instance.
It makes even more sense to have Cashu in LNBits, as that means that any mint created on an LNBits instance will natively be connected to Lightning through the instance's channels, thus strengthening the case for cross-mint interoperability through Lightning.
Phoenix Release
Eclair published version 1.4.24 of their Phoenix wallet, which brings the wallet in compliance with the LNURL specification when it comes to authentication. Indeed, LUD4 specifies that the whole domain of the authentication endpoint must be taken into account for key derivation, while Phoenix used to consider only the main domain. For example: lnmarkets.com instead of api.lnmarkets.com.
To ensure backward compatibility (eg. users still being able to login to their accounts on various services), Phoenix will still use the main domain instead of the whole domain for a few impacted websites.
What role does the domain name play in LNURL-Auth? One of the great things about LNURL-Auth is that it doesn't directly use one's Lightning node pubkey for authentication, but rather derives a new key for each service. This way, two different services will know the same node/wallet as two completely different entities, and won't be able to tell that it's actually the same person. On the other hand, we want users to be able to login using the same key everytime they connect to the same service, in order to access their account. Hence the logical choice to use the service's domain to derive a child key from the node's seed.
Alby Release
The Alby team shipped a new release, which adds support for encrypted messages on Nostr, fixes some bugs (I'm looking at you, YouTube handles) and paves the way for the next release, which is set to be a big one.
Lightning Cash Register By Galoy
Galoy published a blog post announcing a new tool for merchants called the Lightning Cash Register. It allows merchants to easily create a web page from which their staff can create invoices and accept Lightning payments - and nothing more. Thus, the manager can trustlessly let the staff handle the receiving of Lightning payments without fear that a mistake (or something more nefarious) ends up removing money from their account.
The Lightning Cash Register works together with Bitcoin Beach Wallet: the manager can get their register's link from their wallet's settings, and then open it in any browser. Many employees can use the same link at once, and the money will automatically be sent right to the manager's wallet - from which only them can spend.
Ecosystem
BoltFun Finals
The LegendsOfLightning tournament by BoltFun is over! The first place was awarded to Lightsats, followed by AgriMint and Mutiny (we already covered this projects in Latest Strikes: here, here and here). Then comes LNVPN, a very cool VPN provider that only accepts Lightning, and nolooking at the fifth position ('member them?). BitPayRoll (payroll platform for companies paying their employees in Bitcoin) and Saving Satoshi (a cool sci-fi game to learn about Bitcoin coding) complete the podium.
Congratulations to the winners and to all the other projects and builders. I must say it was really inspiring for me to follow along the tournament, and I'm really looking forward to what happens in the BoltFun community in 2023.
Emeralize
Santos Hernandez announced Emeralize, an online learning platform using Lightning as its payment rails, and payments to compensate creators and reward learners. We don't know much yet about what Emeralize will look like when it's out, but you can already check out Santos' vision and what problems he aims to solve.
Strike x Bitnob
Strike and Bitnob announced their partnership, which aims at greatly reducing the cost of remittance to African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya (those are the countries concerned, for now).
It was always possible to send money from Strike to Bitnob, so the news left me a bit wondering at first. But the truth is, it's wasn't that easy yet for a Nigerian to instantly receive money in their own currency (Naira), even so in their bank or mobile money account. It's precisely this last steps that this partnership aims to solve: someone in America can send dollars to their familiy in Africa, and the money will arrive straight to their bank account. The payment goes through the Lightning Network at the speed of light, and Strike and Bitnod handle currency conversions and interconnection with local financial entities (bank, mobile money or Strike/Bitnob account).
List Of Altruistic Watchtowers
Looking for a watchtower to connect to? A list of altrustic watchtowers is being built here.
What is a watchtower? In Lightning, your node must always be online in order to be able to watch the chain and detect when one of your channels is closed. This way, if the close is fraudulent (eg. your peer tries to get on-chain more than their fair share by publishing an old, revoked state), your node can punish them by publishing a Justice Transaction, effectively claiming all the funds in the channel for yourself. A watchtower is a service to which you can externalise this "watch and strike" activity so that, if your node was to go offline for any reason, your funds would still be safe.
Closing Bit
(continued from Latest Strikes 10)
Vous souvient-il de l'âne dont nous causions tantôt?
Il lui est arrivé quelque étrange accident
Il se sentait fort bien, drappé d'un bel égo
Quand survint une affaire au terme embarassant.
Il paissait tranquillement, comme à son habitude
Ecarquillait les yeux et brayait de concert
Quand il fut annoncé qu'un ami, un confrère,
Avait par trop reçu de bons de gratitude.
Bien sûr l'âne à tout va crie son étonnement
Assure que l'âne noir est un cas isolé
Qu'en aucun cas ne faut en généraliser
Une règle commune à toutes les juments.
La foule est apaisée : justice sera rendue !
Et de cette âpre épreuve notre âne ressort plus sûr
Que l'on peut bien prêcher sans être convaincu,
Recevoir le tribut sans les éclaboussures.
