I'm a fully self sovereign Zapper! I don't rely on any 3rd party to send and receive Zaps!

Several months back there was a lot of discussion about how the vast majority of Zapping was custodial. There is no need for that, it's easy to be fully non-custodial!

Here are the quick and easy steps if anyone is interested:

Run a Bitcoin Node

Run a Core Lightning Node on clearnet with good liquidity and a handful of channels

Connect BTCPay server and configure a Lightning Address

Install the BTCPay Nostr Plugin

Update my Nostr profile appropriately

Great, it works, but not reliably so I also added some channels:

getalby - minimum channel size 10,000,000 sats

WalletOfSatoshi - minimum channel size 5,000,000 sats

Now it all works reliably, easy!

I hope you could catch my sarcasm because I was laying it on pretty thick! Unfortunately there is no way that even the vast majority of Nostr power users can pull this off. I'm a Bitcoin Nerd (masochist?) who sets this stuff up because I think it's really fun. Maybe someday there will be an easier way to set up non-custodial Zapping but for the time being Zapping will be fully custodial and I think that's okay. We need more more "Zapping Providers" and more diversity in usage of these providers so that if a given provider rugs the entire Nostr Zapping community doesn't get wiped out. Happy Zapping Nostriches!