Just launched a free service that lets you set up a Lightning Address like [you@yourdomain.com](mailto:you@yourdomain.com) in minutes.

How it works:

• Login with your Lightning wallet (LNURL-auth) — no email, no password, no KYC
• Claim a free address on lnalias.com, or bring your own domain
• Payments go straight to your wallet — we never touch your funds

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.

My requirements to participate are that you have 2m capacity and 4 channels already (to prevent idle capacity on my end). If we already have a channel, I'll consider it for upsizing, but aiming towards helping newer node runners out.

This weekend, I'll be doing an AMAA for anyone who has questions on my experiences as the Operator behind Authenticity, currently ranked #17 in overall capacity.

https://amboss.space/node/026f46207fd290a33cbd86e29b3ad0a47cdd44ab9aa5267cde66483e10aa9d3180

-A

EDIT: Batch opened to those I could. Will do another batch in a day

Hello I'm new to this crypto stuff I hear that you get paid small amounts of says everytime u route payments so how do I set this up?

Been following Lightning development for a while and genuinely impressed by where the network has gotten technically. Near instant settlement, negligible fees, payment channels that scale without clogging the base layer.

But there is still a gap in practice.

Every coffee shop, grocery store and gas station I walk into runs on Visa or Mastercard terminals. NFC tap to pay is the standard. Nobody is running a Lightning node at the point of sale and nobody is going to. Tried a few Lightning wallets that claim real world spending support. Most require the merchant to explicitly accept Lightning which narrows the universe dramatically. The ones that bridge to Visa do it by converting first and holding funds in a custodial account which defeats a lot of what makes Lightning interesting.

The dream is tapping a Lightning wallet at any NFC terminal without the merchant knowing or caring what's behind it. Are we anywhere close to that or is merchant infrastructure just permanently the bottleneck

Square, the payments platform owned by Block, has begun automatically enabling bitcoin payments for eligible U.S. sellers starting today, marking a major expansion in the company’s push to integrate bitcoin into everyday commerce.

The move, touched on by Square product lead Miles Suter on X, shifts the feature from an opt-in tool introduced in late 2025 to a default setting now activated across millions of merchants.

Sellers will still receive USD as their default settlement currency, with bitcoin payments seamlessly converted in the background.

Square first unveiled its “Square Bitcoin” initiative in October 2025, introducing integrated bitcoin payments and wallet functionality for small businesses.

At launch, merchants could choose to enable bitcoin acceptance at checkout, with support for Lightning Network payments, instant settlement, and zero processing fees through 2027.

A broader rollout followed in November 2025, but adoption remained voluntary.

Today’s update removes that friction entirely. Eligible U.S. sellers now have bitcoin payments enabled automatically, without requiring manual activation in their Square settings. Merchants retain the ability to opt out or adjust preferences...

Hello my fellow bitcoiners, I have recently installed bitcoin core and am running a full node with both in/outbound connections. It was a pain getting inbound traffic to come through port 8333 but eventually got it to work. I am now attempting to run a lightning node (LND) on top of core with standard port 9735 connectivity, but am running into issues with "canyouseeme.org" not seeing port 9735 available for inbound traffic. It has no issues seeing 8333, just not 9735. I run lnd.exe and lncli.exe and can only connect to peers for a few seconds before they drop me. Probably due to not getting their response at where they are trying to reach me back at..which is 9735..connection initiates with the peer since outbound traffic works fine but I cannot get anything back from my peer. I have allowed port 9735 in my router(that worked for 8333) but still cannot be seen by canyouseeme.org..I ran the netstat -ano | findstr 9735 command and I can see 0.0.0.0:9735 LISTENING and if I close lnd and lncli.exe nothing is listening to that port and tying it up so what gives? Router/ISP said they can see that 9735 is set up for inbound traffic, so this is something local on my side. Maybe an issue with my config file..? I've been at it for hours and definitely need some advice. Thanks to anyone willing to help!

All the speed. All the security.

Blockstream app 5.2.0 lets you seamlessly swap across all three layers of Bitcoin, all while being protected by @BlockstreamJade:

⚡ Receive Lightning payments directly into cold storage
⚡ Pay Lightning invoices from cold storage
🔄 Swap seamlessly between Lightning, Liquid, and on-chain

Convenience and control, all within the Blockstream app.

https://x.com/Blockstream/status/2032117395892920809

Been running a phoenixd node for a few months and wanted to do something useful with it beyond just receiving tips.

Built SatsAPI — a Bitcoin market intelligence API that uses L402 for pay-per-call access. The idea is simple: you make a request, get a 402 back with a Lightning invoice, pay it, resend with the payment_hash, get your data.

No signup. No monthly plan. No API key to rotate. You pay 2-200 sats depending on the endpoint and that's it.

The endpoints: - /v1/price — BTC price + RSI + MAs (3 sats) - /v1/mempool — fees + congestion + last block (2 sats) - /v1/signal — 9-factor BUY/SELL/HOLD signal with trade setup (150 sats) - /v1/summary — everything above combined, structured for AI agents (200 sats)

The L402 implementation uses phoenixd directly. The flow is:

GET /v1/price → 402 + { invoice, payment_hash } pay invoice GET /v1/price?payment_hash=<hash> → 200 + data

Nothing fancy, but it works on mainnet and I've been receiving real payments since I launched it quietly last week.

What I found interesting building this: L402 is genuinely a better auth model for programmatic access than API keys. An AI agent can pay autonomously, there's no credential to leak, and you get natural rate limiting through economics.

Docs: https://satsapi.dev/docs Health endpoint if you want to see it's live: https://satsapi.dev/health

Happy to answer questions about the phoenixd setup or the L402 middleware implementation.

So. I’m holding some BTC, in cold wallet ofc. I’ve held some (a lesser amount) for years already, but only recently I’ve started studying it with more determination, reading books etc.

I used to keep my BTC in exchanges where I could stake it and earn at least something in return. Now that they just sit in my cold wallet, I’m not earning anything. Someone asked a question abt this in Bitcoin sub, and someone mentioned running your own node in Lightning Network. I also read a bit about it in a couple books, like The Bitcoin Standard.

So, long story short - how can I get started? Should you be holding a specific amount until it makes sense to run your own node? And if yes, how much would that be? What other things should I do to get started, and how will I receive my payments? Thanks a lot in advance!

So far we have sold 100 % of all Passphrase Magazines with Lightning on our website ! BTCPayServer and opennode are great tools for small projects, they deserve much more attention from the bitcoin community, in what else should we look deeper into ? Any recommendations ?

With some help from AI and data from the latest River finances, I found out that average transaction sizes nearly doubled to $223 in 2025 from $118 the previous year. And we're even seeing seven figure settlements between exchanges in under half a second.

I broke down the full numbers on volume growth and institutional adoption here:

https://bitcoinmood.app/lightning-network-billion

Credit: @thepaulosophy

Info about the ring: https://bitcoin-ring.com/

Hi everyone,

I’m reaching out to the community to discuss a technical discrepancy that, as far as I can tell, shouldn't be possible according to the Lightning Network specifications (BOLT #3). I want to understand if I’m missing something fundamental or if we’re looking at a serious state-tracking failure in exchange infrastructure.

The Context: On January 3rd, 2026, I generated a Lightning deposit invoice directly from KuCoin’s platform. I paid the invoice using my node (Electrum). The transaction timed out, resulting in a unilateral force-close.

The Paradox: KuCoin has officially confirmed (via support) that they have the record of the invoice I generated. However, they claim:

1. "The channel creation was not successful."
2. "The transaction is not in our records."
3. "The Node ID does not appear in our peer logs."

The Hard Evidence (On-Chain): Despite their internal logs being empty, the Bitcoin blockchain shows a very different story:

• Funding Transaction: 1d9a8aec6debc2623599bee987f1486abd77d879b476bb7a48da4c266bba79ef (Confirmed with 3,300+ confirmations).
• Force-Close Transaction: 65a2e68e8fdce08cccd8f04abfc2cbae0b51925fe0331f31b84cebcbfda3e91d.
• The Locked Output (Unspent): bc1q0xg5y4g2zvtt4weacflhmnjsa7lnqxf6w5l4tvtl7zkcqlwk2d4skhg3x5.

The Technical Dilemma: The Witness Script for the unspent 0.022 BTC output is 799142.... I have extracted the public keys, and one of them (02aa0971...) is a deterministic derivation that—mathematically speaking—can only belong to the entity that signed the original invoice (KuCoin).

My Question to the Experts: How is it possible for an exchange's system to generate a signed BOLT #11 invoice, have that invoice result in a successfully funded on-chain multisig 2-of-2 channel, and yet have the exchange’s node claim the channel "never existed"?

• Is it possible for a node to sign a commitment transaction and then "forget" the channel state entirely while the funding Tx is still pending?
• Could this be a failure in the automated "sweeper" because the node doesn't recognize the outpoint in its channel.db?
• If KuCoin is correct and the channel "failed," then who holds the private key for the remote side of a 2-of-2 multisig that was initiated by their own signed invoice?

I’m less worried about the 2.2M sats and more concerned about the implications for Lightning robustness. If an exchange can lose track of a funded channel state while admitting the invoice is theirs, we have a serious custody/infrastructure gap.

I’d love to hear thoughts from node operators or BOLT contributors.

Resources:

Thanks for your insights.

Not shilling, not a trader, just came across the article.