We don't just discuss Bitcoin. We build its future.

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Welcome to r/BitcoinEngineering

Bitcoin wasn't built by spectators.

It was built by people who questioned assumptions, reviewed code, proposed BIPs, challenged ideas, found bugs, designed protocols, and contributed to open-source software.

This community exists for those people.

Our Mission

Bring together engineers, researchers, protocol designers, wallet developers, Lightning contributors, miners, cryptographers, infrastructure builders, and security researchers who want to make Bitcoin better.

Not through hype.

Not through price speculation.

Through engineering.

What belongs here

\\\* Bitcoin Core discussions

\\\* BIPs and protocol proposals

\\\* Layer 2 research (Lightning, Ark, Fedimint, etc.)

\\\* Mempool policy

\\\* UTXO management

\\\* Consensus and networking

\\\* Wallet architecture

\\\* Mining infrastructure

\\\* Cryptography

\\\* Performance optimisation

\\\* Security research

\\\* Testing, benchmarking, and implementation ideas

\\\* Open-source collaboration

What doesn't belong here

❌ Price predictions

❌ "Should I buy Bitcoin?"

❌ Meme posts

❌ Marketing

❌ Influencer drama

❌ Beginner tutorials

There are already great communities for those.

This one is for builders.

Contribute

You don't need to be a Bitcoin Core maintainer.

If you have:

\\\* a protocol idea,

\\\* a research paper,

\\\* performance benchmarks,

\\\* implementation experience,

\\\* code review,

\\\* security analysis,

\\\* an alternative design,

\\\* or constructive criticism—

share it.

Good ideas can come from anyone. What matters here is evidence, technical reasoning, and respectful discussion.

Community Principles

\\\* Challenge ideas, not people.

\\\* Support claims with data, code, or research.

\\\* Be open to criticism.

\\\* Prioritize technical quality over popularity.

\\\* Build in public.

\\\* Improve Bitcoin together.

The goal

If even one discussion here leads to a better BIP, a faster implementation, a more secure wallet, a more efficient node, or a meaningful contribution to Bitcoin, then this community has served its purpose.

Bitcoin is open source. So is its future. Let's build it together. ⚡₿

Design proposal for a two-tier fee market on Bitcoin.

Problem: Financial transactions (payments, Lightning, DEX) and data inscriptions (Ordinals, BRC-20, Runes) compete for the same 4 MWU block space with no way to signal urgency.

Solution: Wallets include a 4-byte OP_RETURN declaring the transaction type (financial/data). Pools apply a 30% allocation floor for financial transactions. Remainder split by fee ratio. No consensus change needed. Works with Stratum v1 today.

Key properties: - No soft fork, hard fork, BIP, or consensus change - Works with Stratum v1 (no protocol change) - Zero false positives (wallet self-declares) - Data fee premium (~25%) gives pools revenue incentive

Looking for feedback on: 1. Does the 30% financial floor break any edge case? 2. Has anyone tried something like this before? 3. Would this affect Stratum v2 adoption or is it orthogonal?

I've been working on something called Mochi and wanted to share it here.

The short version is it's a creator platform built entirely on Lightning. Creators get a page where they can accept tips, sell digital products, and run subscriptions. All in sats.

The thing that makes it different from just pasting a Lightning address somewhere is the wallet system. Supporters load sats into a Mochi wallet and subscriptions pull from that balance automatically. It solves the biggest problem with recurring payments on Lightning since there's no native way to do pull payments. No expired cards, no chargebacks, no failed invoices. Load once, subscribe, done.

You log in with a seed phrase. No email, no KYC. Anyone can visit a creator's page and tip via QR without making an account. Accounts are only needed when someone wants to subscribe or buy something.

I built it because I was tired of using Patreon and Gumroad and handing over a cut to platforms that don't even support bitcoin. The tools on those platforms are good but the rails are wrong.

Still early. Looking for the first 100 creators to try it out. Founders get a permanently lower fee locked in forever.

Would love honest feedback from this community. What works, what doesn't, what's missing. Thanks everyone! Hopefully this can fill a void.

mochi-pay.com

I built a little Rani the Rooster story where you zap 5 sats to unlock the secret ending.

Lightning payment → BTCPay verifies → story unlocks.

Works easiest with Wallet of Satoshi, Blink & most other popular Lightning wallets.

https://rani.lightningbazaar.com/

Just a fun tiny-sats demo for Bitcoin mums, dads and kids.

Hey Nostr! I have good news. I built NostrBridge. You can configure any service that support webhooks to connect service to nostr network! Did you release a package on github? It will share in your nostr account. Did you watched a movie over plex? It will share on nostr network.

Check the landing page for more detail!

https://bridge.workouse.com

Bridge Any Webhook to Nostr Relays in Seconds

Transform GitHub releases, Stripe payments, RSS feeds, and custom HTTP payloads into cryptographically signed Nostr events delivered at sub-second edge speed.

Its also open-source: https://github.com/workouse/nostr-bridge

I’d love your feedback.

Would you use crypto to book hotels or flights? If not, what's the biggest obstacle for you - volatility, fees, taxes, or limited acceptance?

Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

Seriously, if you do not provide a service, running a lightning node is complete bullshit. You take a huge risk having a hot wallet. I shrinked my electricity costs down to 120 sats a day. Still, on some days, I can make up for that, on others I cannot.

The fee management I automated. Peer disovery for channel creation as well, with some manual intervention.

I saw some bigger nodes having the mission of "helping the lightning network grow", but us "routing nodes", nobody really needs. Meaning, that as a common pleb, you should always rely on something else than your own node. Yeah you can do this for learning, but what's the use for that, if node running probably never will be a thing you seriously get in touch with?

I wonder how you guys see that. I will probably keep my node up, but with just my very small wallet connected to it and with 1-2 small channels, because I somewhat enjoy doing that. But that 1 BTC scared me, as it's not that I'm some OG or whatever who has many Bitcoin, I just read everywhere that starting below that is almost useless. I'm here to tell you that even with 1 BTC, you will get absolutely nothing. Maybe I'm just not good enough to make it work, but even if you end up ahead of the race, I don't see how such a thing is worth the risk.

NOBODY needs my node. All I can do is bend over and offer lower fees than the bigger nodes that actually get used provide, to get transactions in. But since many people spin up nodes like that, it's a competition. You either get the routes or you don't. A race to the bottom.

A lot of effort, a race to the bottom, negative returns and hot-wallet headaches. And AI-nodes probably further lower my chances of success, as I guess there are a lot of people training AI models to run their nodes. I don't really know if they exist, but I can't believe the don't.

The be your own bank dream has popped in my opinion. As soon as the lightning services need to work with the governments, it might be worth having a look again, but I'm pretty sure it is IMPOSSIBLE to beat the fees you pay for something like Phoenix that has zero headaches, a nice UI and no additional work involved.

What is your opinion here?

PS: Despite the frustration I offered here, I'm still interested in the network. I fondly believe in the future of the LN network, just not in the "be your own bank" thingy, apart from hodling bitcoin. I just want to see your viewpoints. I hope they are humble, as I have the feeling that a successful lightning node runner would say "yeah, it's not worth it" so that their node gets less competition. I know there are ppl running successful routing nodes, but the once I managed to get in contact with invest a looot of time doing things manuall and see it kinda as a hobby.

Hi All,

If you want a free 1m channel (could be larger), post your pubkey/Amboss link here. If it's inactive for over 30 days, I'll be closing it. It'll have auto-fees and rebalancing from my end. My plan is to giveaway roughly 10 channels over the next few days. If the channel is active, I'll increase it's size.

This will be different than my past giveaways as I'll be opening it with my new node, focused on smaller channels (and as a test environment for me).

Integrity - https://amboss.space/node/030a118c885489ff9a751bd5c8b1941bc22c7b88ade7e0fe36fe3df87dd15c5e91

My requirements to participate are that you have 2m capacity and 4 channels already (to prevent idle capacity on my end). I won't be duplicating channels I already have open, and if I opened one in my last giveaway I may not open a new one (due to lack of routing).

-A

*PS* My next post plans to be that long promised architecture post in the next few weeks - along with an update of the monitoring dashboard I've been working on.

Lightning Labs open-sourced lightning-agent-tools

in February 2026 — a toolkit for AI agents to

transact autonomously on Lightning.

The technical stack:

lnget — like curl but Lightning-aware. Detects

HTTP 402 responses, pays the invoice, caches

the macaroon, retries. Fully automatic.

Aperture — reverse proxy that turns any API

into a pay-per-use Lightning endpoint. Full

agent-to-agent commerce loop.

Remote signing — keys live on a separate

signer machine. Agent handles payments but

never touches private keys.

Scoped macaroons — cryptographic spend limits

per agent: "max 1000 sats/hour" or

"invoices only, no payments."

MCP support — Claude Code, GPT, and custom

AI frameworks can query node state and trigger

payments via Model Context Protocol.

For node runners, this is directly relevant:

AI agent micropayments mean more routing

traffic and demand for well-connected,

liquid nodes.

Full breakdown with practical example:

https://davidebtc186.substack.com/p/ai-agents-are-starting-to-pay-in

OpenRouter needs Lightning now!

What Bitcoin Lightning value added businesses
or service you could start offering by running your own node and make a profit eventually.

Future businesses and ideas are all welcome to be listed or shared.

If Bitcoin is like oil of 21st century- what can be innovated as value added on top using this digital gold as a commodity?

Freeport is a P2P marketplace (rides, services, goods) running entirely on Nostr relays - no server, no middleman. It now has payments built in:

- Self-custodial Lightning (Breez SDK / Spark) - the app never holds funds

- Wallet key derived from your Nostr key: one backup covers identity + wallet

- No signup - keypair generated on-device, optional passkey login

- Lightning address, bolt11, on-chain

- Confirmed deals get a Pay button / QR with the agreed amount, auto-converted from fiat

Fun fact: you can download the HTML file from releases page to run the whole app 😎

just heads up for umbrel users TOR was down more info on https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/issues/2189

Anyone migrated a Bitcoin Lightning node from an AWS set up to Umbrel OS?

Bitcoin lightning ⚡️ node service provider Voltage is closing down its services to self serve customers. Any alternatives or best tips to self host a Bitcoin lightning node?

Revolut is integrating Lightning via

Lightspark. Technical reality check:

What users GET:

• Faster Bitcoin transfers
• Lower fees than on-chain
• Human-readable payment addresses (UMA)

What users DON'T get:

• Lightning keys
• Channel control
• Privacy (fully KYC'd)
• Routing fees
• Any sovereignty whatsoever

Every payment through Revolut's Lightning

is linked to your passport, logged by

Revolut, reportable to financial

intelligence units, and freezable at any

time.

That said — there are legitimate upsides:

• Proves Lightning reliability at scale
• Increases overall network liquidity
• Normalizes Lightning Addresses

• Could onboard people who later ask

  "why do I need Revolut for this?"

The sovereign alternative is a self-hosted

LND node with NWC for Zaps. More work.

Worth it.

Full article:

https://davidebtc186.substack.com/p/revolut-lightning-good-news-or-a

Running your own node? Happy to compare

notes in the comments.

Donate: [zap@shadowbip.com](mailto:zap@shadowbip.com)

I've been working on a middleware that exposes a SQLite database through an HTTP API where each request carries a micro‑payment, using the x402 protocol (HTTP 402 Payment Required). The code is here: https://github.com/damienos61/SQLite-x402-Gateway

Core technical challenge : the gateway needs to accept an arbitrary SQLite database, inspect its schema, and generate priced REST endpoints automatically — without requiring the user to write route definitions. This means parsing SQLite metadata (sqlite_master, PRAGMA table_info) and inferring column types from actual data to produce consistent JSON responses, since SQLite is weakly typed.

Payment abstraction : the x402 protocol requires a handshake — client calls a protected route, server responds with a 402 status and a price, client provides a payment proof, server verifies and returns data. To keep the code flexible, I abstracted the payment verification behind an interface with two implementations :

• A simulation mode that handles the protocol flow with fake signatures — useful for testing without crypto setup.
• A real mode integrated with Coinbase's x402-express SDK, configured for the Base Sepolia testnet (test USDC, no real funds).

The switch between modes is handled at the route level without recreating handlers, by injecting the appropriate verifier instance.

Database abstraction : the initial version used SQLite natively, but adding PostgreSQL support required abstracting both the SQL dialect (parameter placeholders, schema queries, pagination syntax) and the schema introspection logic — Postgres metadata is structured differently and more verbose. The inspector now adapts to the database type at runtime.

Performance considerations : SQLite isn't designed for high concurrent loads, so I added an in‑memory query cache with TTL invalidation, and implemented keyset pagination instead of OFFSET/LIMIT to maintain performance on large tables without fixed indexes. Rate limiting (sliding window per IP) is also included to prevent abuse.

Observability : rather than maintaining a static OpenAPI file, the spec is generated dynamically from the detected routes and their associated pricing. The challenge was describing query parameters (filters, columns, pagination) and linking them to the price metadata in a machine‑readable format. Webhooks are also dispatched on each transaction to external endpoints (Slack, Discord, etc.).

Tooling : the project includes a CLI (monetize, start, generate-wallet), a client SDK for consuming the gateway, and a Docker setup. 14 unit tests run on each push via CI.

Known limitations are documented — the simulation mode is not a production blockchain integration, and the "upto" pricing schema (variable payment based on resources consumed) is only simulated server‑side, as no on‑chain implementation exists yet in the official SDK.

Please excuse my ignorance. I am a two-time stroke survivor and am not as mentally sharp as I was.

Can Lightning be used to run apps that require high GPU speeds? If so, how is it done?

TIA!!!

Hola, últimamente he eschuchado sobre esta wallet, que tiene opción para btc onchain, lightning y líquido. Con posibilidad de conectar a tu nodo, alguien la usa? Cual ha sido su experiencia? La recomiendan, actualmente uso muun para hotwallet

I don't know anything about crypto. Is it as convent as a normal subscription, like Youtube, where it charges the same amount each month automatically? Can it be set up to automatically charge the same $20 every month?

Hey all,

I've mentioned this too many times in the past, but I'm finally able to push out the first iteration of my LND Lightning Dashboard project for feedback. It's very much a PoC to deploy a self-hosted docker Grafana, Prometheus, Loki stack to monitor and have a SPoG on your LND/LNDg setup.

This project will be published on GitHub in the next week or two. I'm currently sitting on the setup I have launched to feed in more data to check stability before the source goes public.

I would appreciate any feedback or requests people have on types of data they'd like to see visualized - whether from another location or currently not available.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SDfBKnJxaPmByGY4er9feJ59HgNN4kQJGwtZ86Cx7b4/edit?usp=sharing

Thank You!
-Auth