I am a believer in the idea of bitcoin. It is a genuine ultralight idea. It’s actually one of only a few assets I can wrap my head around. If you’re new to bitcoin, there’s a great explainer post here. They say you should never invest in anything you don’t understand. That being said, I don’t understand how banks really make their money, or what makes a price go up or down on a stock, or the ins-and-outs of retirement investments. But I do understand bitcoin and how it works. So much so that I decided to accept bitcoin for products and services moving forward. It was actually a lot easier than I imagined and the framework is already here for any type of business ready to change with the times by adding it to their payment options.
The software you need to accept bitcoin payments in business is free and open-sourced. The resources needed to run them however, do have an associated cost (about $20/mo.) and that’s something that needs to be taken into consideration. What’s great is the avoidance of fees! No more 2.9% fee and twenty-five cent charges on transactions. That could make the investment worth its weight in bitcoin. Disclaimer, I’m not an expert on this subject but I was able to setup bitcoin payments through this website and if I could do it, anyone can. Here’s what I recommend after having gone through it myself. It’s free to try.
The best place to start is actually voltage.cloud. You sign up, login, and you get $10 credited to your account to get started. This is the time to go wild and make mistakes because you can always delete stuff, start over, or sign up with a new account. The user interface of the site is minimalistic and that keeps things simple. You want to click “nodes”, and then “LND”, and then select “LiteNode” and “Create”. Next, give your lightning node a cool name and make a secure password and you’re done! Now we’re going to create another node and this time we’re going to choose BTCPay Server. Again, pick a cool store name and you should see the “Enable Lightning?” is already checked and you should see the lightning node you created earlier. Enter the secure password you made for your lightning node and click create. From there, you need to create a wallet and it’s best to follow a great video tutorial found here. The easiest method is to just create a wallet on the server and save that 12-or-24-word seed phrase! And never lose it!. It’s the only way to get your bitcoin if some technical disaster happens. When you’re done, let’s continue.
Don’t forget to claim your free channel by logging into your LND node on voltage.cloud. On the home screen, there’s a banner that pops up with a “request channel” button. You definitely want to use this. Bear in mind, there’ll be a lot of lingo you may not understand but that’s ok. What requesting a channel does is connect you to the lightning network. It’s a newer, faster, cheaper way to pay with bitcoin. It’s still in its infancy stages but the gist is that it will allow you to receive a maximum 0.005 bitcoin or about $100 through the lightning network at the time of this writing. You can still receive unlimited bitcoin using the older, slower, more expensive way of sending bitcoin so don’t worry about the cap. I recommend waiting until you have at least 0.25 BTC before attempting to increase your cap. When you do, reach out and I can show you how to open channels and help you get started in the lightning network. For now, it’s good enough.
There’s a couple cool apps on the BTCPay Server website where you can setup your items for a way for people to pay. There is an easy template called “Point of Sale” where you can setup products, food items, or any service you’re offering and list a price for. I recommend offering the same item or products with a promo bitcoin discount to incentivize people to use bitcoin. If they ask you how they can pay with bitcoin in the future, please refer them to the Strike app. It’s the simplest way for non-crypto people to get into the game. It works like a gift card that can be refilled with USD. Whenever there’s a bitcoin or lightning invoice and that weird “B” QR-code is put in front of them, they can simply use their Strike app to scan it and send cash. The app automatically exchanges the money it into BTC and pays the seller. It’s amazingly seamless and it works beautifully with my own BTCPay Server.
I realize I spent an exorbitant amount of time and energy on this side quest. But at the end, it was so much fun learning and re-learning things and finding the ultralight solution. Just wanted to take the time to spare you the hours of research and get started accepting bitcoin today. If you’ve found value in this post, please leave me a comment, I’d love to connect with you.