At the Bitcoin Conference in Miami of 2023, there was a single guest wearing a fox mask while he attended. The mask was the Keaton mask from the Legend of Zelda series, but "fox mask" is specific enough! He wore this mask as a statement to promote privacy, but also to practice that privacy in the most fun way he could.
He was a shy fellow, but he also knew the mask would draw attention. Trading solitude for privacy is a counterintuitive exchange, but he was happy to make it in return for a bit of fun.
There were many who spoke to him, and all were met with politeness. Even in cases of mistaken identity (which are understandable with a mask blocking the way) and those rare cases where he bumped into someone he couldn't see (and if any of you are reading this, sorry again!), he did his best to show kindness and insight to those who spoke to him.
The most unusual meeting was with a pair of other guests wearing anonymous masks, the kind you think of when you hear the title "V for Vendetta." At first he almost looked away completely, but thought "wait a minute..." No words were exchanged. None were needed. They stared each other down for a moment, 3 unseen smiles hidden behind unmoving masks. He waved to them. They waved back. "These guys get it," he thought. "What a nut," they thought in reply. And each one went on their way.
Some guests were able to recognize the mask for what it was from the Legend of Zelda. One cleverly approached and said "That is a Happy Mask," and he could hear the capitalization in those words! Others thought it looked like Pikachu, or a cat, or the Metamask fox. The guest didn't mind. As long as people smiled when they saw him, he had accomplished his goal.
As the conference ended, he left as mysteriously as he had appeared. No one could say for sure who he was or where he went. Would he return the next year in Nashville? Would he choose to attend other conferences with a different focus? Or perhaps he would rest for a year, and arrive again at a later time?
It could be any of these. But that is a story for another time...
My biggest surprise at the conference was the cases of mistaken identity. The back of my shirt has the Coin Bureau logo (it's one from their merch store), and people who walked up behind me asked if I worked for Coin Bureau. I just like the Evolution of Money shirt because it resonates with me. I guess I'll keep this in mind for next time? I don't want to mislead anyone, after all.
The crowd loved Kennedy out here. The man just hit point after point fo this audience! Good impression for sure!
And then I acceidentally walked in on Robert Breedlove giving a talk on the main stage (good stuff). That's both of my favorite bitcoin folks I've gotten to see in person. This is a successful trip!
Got to meet Peter McCormack and shake his hand. Pretty awesome! My mask might've thrown him for a loop, but getting a jersey for his football club became my first lightning purchase. I'd halfway hoped for a bump into like that, so it was really cool!
Nostr vs Everything panel at the Bitcoin Conference was a good one. Is it really so simple to program with Nostr that you can have a draft of an application in, like, 10 minutes? I'm just barely getting my feet wet with it so far, but I need to dig into the weeds more. I know a few things about quick programming projects, so I could see doing some cool things with it!
BTCPay is meant to be a tool for an online storefront. For bitcoin addresses, it's good practice to use a different address for each transaction you receive. With lightning, you need an invoice for each transaction you want to receive (for the most part). BTCPay has functions where you can create a link or a button to embed on a webpage, and it will serve the new addresses and invoices seamlessly for your users.
I've had quite a week. I'm on standby at my job with literally nothing that needs doing, so I've been spending my time getting set up to use lightning. (We won't mention that to my boss unless our company wants to start using lightning too!) And wow, have I been through a lot.
I have a Start 9 Embassy which did the heavy lifting for me. This thing is fantastic in terms of what it can do and making it easy, but as I work with it, I'm left with a constant question: "Am I doing this right?" I ran into cases where restarting a service didn't solve the issue, but restarting it a second time did. It's been that kind of week.
Setting up a Nostr relay last week was pretty straightforward. The most troubleshooting I had to do was making sure the relay address was spelled correctly. The "56 character string of random nonsense" address. I only got it wrong once!
Lightning was a little more tricky. I run a Raspberry Pi with an archival bitcoin node separate from my Embassy. I tried to figure if I could use Bitcoin Proxy to connect to it, but it seems automatically configured to link to Bitcoin Core on the same device. I wondered if I could transfer my node's external drive to the Embassy, but it doesn't play nicely with external drives and only expects to use them for backups. So in the end, I sighed and started Bitcoin Core for a pruned node on the Embassy. I really hoped to avoid that initial block download a second time, but what can you do?
Once that was ready, installing and starting LND was also straightforward (other than taking a few hours to sync the graph), but it's hard to tell if that's working without an interface. I installed Thunderhub and Lightning Terminal next to connect to it and see what I could see. This is where I ran into technical trouble involving restarting services multiple times--LND runs smoothly most of the time, but it hiccups now and then and needs a restart. When LND doesn't work, the front ends can't do much!
Following some instructions, I opened a channel with Start 9's lightning node. I imagine I'm paying high fees using this one (their fee is 1000 ppm), but it's a start and I'm learning. I figured I'd send some sats to an app on my phone so I'd be ready for the conference in Miami next week and have some inbound liquidity on my channel. Two birds with one stone!
I had Muun wallet already, and I tried getting an invoice from it to pay from Thunderhub. I got some kind of error about a null parameter, and I assumed it was because the destination was marked as "unknown" (it wasn't). I tried downloading Phoenix wallet and made another invoice. Same problem. After some poking around, I tried to transfer some BTC back to the main chain. Same problem. I tried to close the channel. Same problem.
That's about when I realized Thunderhub was the piece that was being finicky. I installed Ride The Lightning and tried my invoice from Phoenix wallet again. This time it worked without a hitch, and I have my sats right where I want them now!
With that in place, next comes integrating with Damus. It asked for an LNUrl, or a Lightning Address. What are these, I wonder? A bit of searching, and they make a lot of sense--a reusable way to pay a lightning wallet without explicitly making an invoice each time. But how do I do this? Thunderhub is working to decode my test invoices, but I don't see a function to create one of these...
A day of searching, and I come across BTCPay Server on my Embassy. I had heard people talk about services like this and might have even thought "I should set that up," but never touched it yet. My goodness, what have I been waiting for? Having a service which can get fresh payment addresses and create a lightning address is a beautiful thing to have, and all the more from a machine in my basement! In fact, having all of this put together and running on a machine at home feels good, good, so very good.
I had my doubts several times throughout the week, and each night I was on the verge of giving up. I know my way around programming languages, but I'm not exactly a veteran at using the command line or compiling binaries, so I don't think I could have pulled this off without the Embassy being what it is. Issues and all, I'm really happy with this machine, and I'm happy to have all these services up and running.
For now it's just the steps necessary to have lightning enabled over Nostr, but this means I've done the hard part laying the groundwork for the future too. With lightning and BTCPay set up, I can set up taking payments for anything that seems appropriate as time goes on. Having my options open is important to me, and I feel like I can do powerful things after this week of set up.
But I'm a bit exhausted for now, so we'll wait to start thinking about that until after the conference next week. Hope to see some of you there!
In 1 week, I've done what I thought would take 1 month and have wanted to do for 1 year. My lightning node is set up, I have a channel open, and I have a BTCPay server running so I have a lightning address.
That address is an onion address though, and none of my wallet apps know how to work with it. I'm not 100% sure it works yet! If anyone zaps me, let me know which wallet you used for it!
Next post will be more in depth on how my week went. It's not a bad story.
Figuring it out! My hope is to have that ready by the end of the week.
Well, step one down. I have a relay running and an account made. Next step will be figuring out who to follow and get the conversations going!