sackot

Not necessarily, there are other factors at work. Firstly, the transaction costs are not set directly by miners. The fee is a tip added by the sender, not a charge levied by the miner. It is set by the free market, in that too low a fee and the miners will not bother to process your transaction in a timely manner, so the fee adjusts itself according to network congestion. In practice your wallet will usually look at recent fees and the time taken to go through, then suggest fees for fast, medium and slow service. The emission rate per block is set by the halving process, as Danny said, and set in stone. The difficulty of mining a block is dynamic and set by an algorithm. The algorithm adjusts the difficulty until one block is produced every ten minutes on average, though this is a stochastic process. Extending Danny's example, if half the miners give up, the block rate will initially go down and then the difficulty will adjust to restore it, so those miners don't find it twice as expensive to mine a block.

Not exactly, so don't fret. As I described in a long post above, they had a misleading menu item which fooled some users into creating low-entropy, insecure wallets, which were then swept by miscreants and significant BTC lost. If you check your balance now and again, you'd know by now and it's been fixed. If you watch all the goings on in bitcoin security, I suspect you will slightly increase your priors for wallet theft, but it's still rare.

That's like saying "cows are better than sheep for farmers, IMO". It depends. SSS: *Protection against physical theft. *Redundancy so less likely to lose seed. It doesn't matter how carefully you preserve your seed if you get a wallet exploit. Multisig: * NofN, physically colocated: protects against wallet exploits. * NofN, geographically separated: as above, plus protection against theft. * NofM: all above, plus redundancy. Wallet exploits: rare, but happens now and then. Physical seed theft: rare, but happens now and then. I don't understand why I keep hearing how hard NofM multisig is. I've not tried it myself (yet) but AFAIK all the fuss is about one particular gotcha. Once you know that, no problem. For 2of3 multisig, you must store, in each of three locations, three public keys and one private key (or something equivalent to that). If you neglect the pubkeys, when you lose one of three storage locations, you can no longer construct the spending transaction. That's it. That's the scary difficult problem.

Hello Danny, Since you put together an online/offline setup with Armory and USB system with encrypted partition, I know you are perfectly competent to decide what best suits your needs. I think I might not have done a good job explaining why my choice would be different though, so I thought I'd expand it a bit. For most people this will be a long, boring, too-long-so-don't read. Your optimal storage solution depends on at least these three things: Your knowledge and competence. The particular threats you want to protect against. The value of your BTC. Having put together three DIY wallets, looked at how they work and considered the risks I need to protect against, I concluded that for single-sig, software wallet < hardware wallet < carefully run online/offline Armory. Maybe not everyone agrees, but I insist, hardware wallets are not a panacea. If you doubt this, consider this story: Coldcard. Respected provider. Open source. Widely recommended. They had a poorly-written menu item. When you create a wallet, the hardware normally will run a RNG to create 256 bits of entropy. Because of another disaster where a common, if not widely used Python bitcoin library had mishandled the RNG and lost a lot of entropy, leading to stolen bitcoin, people have started paying more attention to RNG quality. The Specter HW, for example, runs the RNG, then adds some environmental noise from the onboard MEM microphone, and offers to modify the result further with dice rolls. The Coldcard menu said "Add entropy with dice". People assumed a setup like the Specter, so a few dice rolls would be XORed with the RNG output for extra protection. They threw a couple for good luck. In fact, the menu label should have said "ignore the RNG and create a new, super duper secret root seed with dice rolls". 50 or more rolls would have worked, but two meant the seed was: <1-6>,<1-6>,0,0,0,0...... (only 36 possibilities). Hackers spotted this, searched the blockchain for those wallets, and stole the coins. I read this history, and thought "could I have been caught by this?". Absolutely, yes, I'd have assumed the sensible meaning for the menu item because I'd never have believed that Coldcard would have allowed anything so stupid in a key generation step. They did fix the problem, but my recollection is that they were not even particularly apologetic. I imagine the affected users would initially have spoken up on Reddit, only to be told they were obviously idiots and had leaked their seed, or were simply lying. Every hardware wallet I looked at has some attack surface; this is not specific to Coldcard, which really is a good wallet. Jade, for example, has no secure element. Seedsigner, being stateless, requires you to enter the seed each time from a QR code--one day, will you wave that QR code while passing a webcam that didn't get switched off, or some Android device where a hacker has switched on the camera? If you limit the threat you are countering to individual wallet vulnerabilities, not Evil Maid or Inheritance Planning problems or anything else, simple 2of2 multisig will solve it. For independent vulnerabilities, the improbability will be squared, while the key management is only trivially more complex. You need each wallet to make a seed, and have backups for each. The wallets can be stored together in the same place you'd have kept a single wallet--this will be no worse than having just one wallet. The backups likewise. Obviously, you'd try it with 0.01 BTC first, and check you can transact and restore from backup only. This is where I am just getting to now, though I've not decided which two wallets to combine for real. If you do the 2of2, the day you wake up to the headline "Ledger hacked, LedgerLive installed malicious firmware" or whatever, you will not have a heart attack. PS1 I think the fear over complex multisig comes from NofM setups for redundancy or wills. There are ways to get that wrong, both technical and social. I'm worried about how to leave coins to a non-technical partner, so will have to tackle that one day, but I'm postponing it. PS2 FWIW I run a single-sig Ledger as a staging/hot wallet for modest amounts with no qualms.

It's only inconsistent if you really think I'm advocating a one-size-fits-all solution for "people". That couldn't be further from my intention; I was talking about people-like-Danny. I remember him of old, he's a knowledgeable and competent Bitcoiner. He also may well have a significant stack to protect. In the article I was recalling, the biggest failure was seed handling, but the bulk of the failures were IIRC: Did not write down seed words. Wrote down seed words--in a document which they backed up to the cloud. Gave their seed words to the nice gentleman calling from the Crypto help desk in Nigeria. Perhaps I need not have referenced it, because we don't have anyone like that here (do we?). Some bitcoiners would flame me for this, but IMO anyone who makes those mistakes should not be advised to self-custody, let alone do "complicated multisig". If you know one such, for now, the best advice, given as gently as possible, would be to use an exchange or ETF. This may change. Every time you open or close a lightning channel, you are doing a multisig transaction. With a smart contract! You don't even need to know that most of the time, you just click on "close channel" and the client handles it all for you. We just need better education and better wallets.

>I have a very old offline armory wallet on a usb stick with an encrypted file system Snap, and I still think Armory was the best wallet at the time and is still good now. I'd not be in any hurry to move away. The only problem is that it predated/foreshadowed bip32/39, so the backups are not compatible with modern wallets. That means that if ever things moved on to the point you could not run the online half of an online/offline Armory pair, you could be stuck. I may move to hardware, but would not go with one alone, it would be multisig with different vendors. That way, if Ledger were compromised in some way, you'd still be safe. Sorting out your seed storage would be vital, though. I'm thinking of following the stamping on stainless trend for fire/flood resistance, but also using a bip39 password so that someone finding your backup still needs something else. For myself, I'm old enough that estate planning matters too. I now have a pile of DIY wallets (Seedsigner, DIY Jade, Specter now operational, Krux on order) and will play a lot before I'm ready to rely on any. I noticed that a specialist in wallet recovery attempts says that more people lose their coins by messing up seed storage than to wallet hacks or exploits, but I would still lose sleep with a single hardware wallet: Ledger, for example, emphasized that your wallet is only as safe as the firmware you put on it by introducing a method to extract the seed and send it to third parties for safe storage! Even 2/2 multisig greatly reduces that risk.

I don't know in the detail you are probably looking for, but I have a small SIPP split between gold and BTCE so have been watching roughly how it does. The BTC one has a big management fee (2% IIRC) which eats away at it, much more expensive than gold or other ETFs. If I were allowed to jump ship to one of these new ETFs it would be well worth it, but given the appreciation of BTC I still can't complain.

You're rampaging away with the research, good job. For doubtful users I agree simplicity is a virtue and KYC a PIA, so if your Swiss setup works that will be great. ISTR from my slight dealings with Swiss institutions that they assume you can do a free SEPA transfer which might not apply for UK. Maybe not relevant for your purposes, but my experience of setting people (friends not customers) up with Lightning was that the absolute simplest approach was Wallet of Satoshi. If you are sitting with someone and want to show them how easy it is to pay with Lightning, you can have them download it and be up and running in a couple of minutes. Transfer a few satoshis from your own phone, send them off to buy the coffee. WoS allows in-app bitcoin purchase via something called Moonpay, which takes Visa etc. Not integrated in the way you want, I assume the exchange rate will not be great, and WoS is pretty limited, but a way of getting people started.

Thumbs up to BTC Pay and a hardware wallet, I hadn't guessed you'd be wanting to get into the nitty-gritty. You didn't mention what size or frequency of payments would be involved. If small and frequent, you must be set up to use Lightning. Unfortunately that requires a hot wallet, which will need to be swept often to your hardware wallet so you don't leave too much online. If payments are larger on-chain should be fine for now but I do expect the fees to increase over time. Also, one of the commonest complaints from customers who expect the fee to be constant is "service X just charged me large fee Y WTF?".

https://swiss-bitcoin-pay.ch/ Is this the kind of thing you're looking for? No personal experience of them, unfortunately.

In the 'buy coffee with bitcoin', there's one respect in which I'm in a grand minority of one; I don't think anyone here agrees with me. All the "yeah, it's basically the same as any forex transaction on a VISA card, via a middleman": at one level, yes, but with an important difference. The middleman is never in the middle, he works for one side or the other. I could sign up at a crypto exchange and get a VISA debit card. It works like this: 1) Sign up for VISA card. 2) Deposit BTC (because it's a debit card) 3) Exchange runs off with BTC (or locks my account, or goes bankrupt, whatever). I F..d up. I gave my bitcoin to a trusted third party. In the coffee shop case, I go in, send my sats, drink my coffee, leave. That afternoon the exchange goes bankrupt... no skin off my nose. Not even a big deal for the coffee shop so long as they are repatriating their GBP promptly. Now I'm using a cash equivalent, a bearer instrument. I can swap it with my friends, or use it in a shop. In the first case, the middleman worked for me, in the second, for the coffee shop. In Africa they have a lightweight system like that called M-PESA, based on swapping mobile phone credits. Bitcoin offers something equivalent for the unbanked, exchanging small sums with almost no fee, and yet the same system is bulletproof and battle-tested enough that Tesla felt able to store 1.2 Billion USD worth on the blockchain. I personally think that's amazing.

Yes, you're right about that. The Lightning network currently has around 5000 BTC (80 million $) sloshing around it. This is completely swamped by the margin power of traders playing silly games with each other, making the BTC exchange rate volatile. BTC in Lightning is a proxy for the quantity of BTC being used day-to-day for goods and services. For another real-world indicator, if you look at https://btcmap.org/map you'll probably see a few businesses around you accepting Lightning/BTC, but vastly outnumbered by those who don't. The number of BTC in Lightning is heading steadily upwards, though. The hope of Bitcoiners is that at some point the situation cf. traders will reverse. Once they start to lose their precious volatility, I anticipate that most will pack their bags and go, setting off a virtuous circle crushing volatility further.

It's clear that @staffsknot and I will never agree, you'll just have to take each explanation and decide which corresponds most to reality. In any case, I don't care much about the legal definitions, I would take a "Walks like a duck" approach however the duck was defined. I do care about correctly describing the technical process, and why this advance offers advantages to both vendor and buyer. The card is a sleight of hand which obscures how the system works, so take a step back to normal Lighting payments: You want to buy a pint. The pub will display a price in GBP. The vendor's device contacts your device and asks you to pay 123,456 sats. His PoS will probably display a QR code, which you scan with your phone. That code is a Lightning invoice, and your wallet will say "pay 123,456 sats to Lighting node 3efghijklmn12 <Yes><No>. You click on Yes. The vendor will have directed that payment to an exchange which will convert it to GBP. The only demand, which I assented to, was for a quantity of sats. Whether that will indeed be convertible and converted to any particular quantity of GBP is between the vendor and his exchange, and is completely outside my remit or control. I did not consent to pay XX GBP, I consented to and paid 123,456 sats. AFAIC that's the invoice. I believe @staffsknot says the invoice is a document somewhere in the vendors accounting system which demands payment of XX GBP. I never saw it, though, and it's not what I assented to. The contactless card just tells the vendor, "don't send the invoice to my phone, just pass it on to this online wallet of mine which has pre-agreed instant purchases upto a maximum of XXXXX sats.

I'm with you on the gold. During my highest earning years, I was saving into building society accounts. I was totally financially illiterate, but wanted to save for my retirement and did not trust any private pension scheme to work for me. After a decade, I finally started to twig what was happening and project into the future. At that point (2005), I started to buy gold (in Bullionvault) and my only regret now is that I did not do that with a higher percentage of my savings. People keep calling this "speculation". That's not the intention, it's an attempt to avoid having your savings obliterated so your old age is lived in penury. You are trying to get what you earned and are owed, not become rich by gambling. I also agree that most inhabitants of third world countries understand this more readily than Brits.

You are 'explaining' to me how the contactless lightning PoS works, I presume based on hypotheses. I know how it works. Some of what you say is true, and other parts are wrong or misleading. The link I gave to @data_dave above gives the specs for the card, the customer server, and the vendor PoS. You will note in the payment flow that the vendor issues a Lightning invoice (in BTC) and the customer server pays it. The customer can use their own (private) server to pay. The spec does not speak to how the vendor derives a GBP/BTC conversion rate. I imagine if the vendor uses Coincorner the rate will be that on their exchange at that moment. Above I said "I send the retailer bitcoin. They convert it to pounds." and you said that was incorrect, because "You send the BTC to Coincorner" and "You are simply benefitting from a service someone else is providing". This is misleading. The vendor does not have to use Coincorner, they can use any exchange they (not I) want, if they have the tech expertise to arrange it. The exchange works for the vendor, not for me, and my statement was a correct description (unless maybe you thought I meant each coffee shop has to run their own crypto exchange). "It is precisely what happens with a forex on a card." I'm at a loss what definition of equality you are using here. Maybe "both depend on some exchange somewhere in the world converting currencies, so they're the same", or "both result in the vendor receiving the currency of their choice, so they're the same"? Under any less shallow definition they're vastly different. They differ in a way which is fundamental to Bitcoin, so if you can't see the difference you will never get Bitcoin. a) I pay a British shop with Euro notes, at EoD they pop round to the bank and convert them. b) I (French) have a Euro bank account. I present my card in a British shop, and my bank converts euros to to pounds to settle (charging me a fee). The first enables me to use cash. The second requires me to have an account with an institution. Bitcoin is a cash equivalent, so of necessity the transaction must be of form a), and that's what happens in the payment flow for the Coincorner card. You might not care about the difference, but that doesn't mean there is none. You threw in a few straw men. I never said that the vendor displays prices in BTC. I said that Lightning is cheaper than VISA, but never claimed that BTC would be the unique and only possible way to achieve that. That would be silly.

OK, we're getting really close, to the point that you may think it's practically a semantic argument, but a bitcoiner would not. My statement, which you disagree with, was accurate. As an aside, upthread you mocked Python and stuff, but as a techie I completely understand the tech side of how the system works. I described it very carefully to @data_dave, and stand by that description. The card enables the transfer of bitcoin from a wallet which I nominate (could be at Coincorner, could be mine) to a wallet which they nominate. An instant later, the bitcoin belongs to the recipient. Technically, they sent my wallet an invoice in sats (bitcoin) which I paid. From that point, they could run the whole system themselves (moving the contents of their wallet to an exchange at the end of day, for example, and having it converted to GBP) or they can elect to nominate a wallet at Coincorner, who will automatically convert, but charge a fee. That is of course the default for a system provided by Coincorner, but it's optional. You said yourself, Coincorner makes the conversion on the instructions of the recipient: they do it with bitcoin which belong to the recipient. For all I care, they could convert it to Special Drawing Rights or Apple stock, makes no difference to me. You apparently would tell me "You don't understand, you are actually paying in Apple shares". As I stated earlier, this is not equivalent to your Starbucks/VISA example. Coincorner are not doing anything for me, they don't charge me a fee. If I use a wallet of my own they probably don't even know I exist. If it works as a fig-leaf for AML, fine, no skin off my nose. Meanwhile, the merchant saves fees from VISA, and the tiny bitcoin fees go to operators of nodes on the Lighting network. If it becomes widespread, eventually it opens the possibility that I could save my worth as bitcoin and largely avoid GBP and banks. I assure you, this is all correct.

Here is a simple and precise statement. I send the retailer bitcoin. They convert it to pounds. Do you disagree with that?

No, that's not a correct analogy. With my bitcoin card, bitcoin flows from my wallet to the retailer's wallet. The retailer chooses to immediately convert it to pounds, but that's of no interest to me. I get my coffee. The correct analogy with euros would be if I were a tourist sitting in a hotel with a pile of euro notes. If I go out and see only "pounds accepted here" that is of no use to me. If I go out, see "euros accepted here", it gladdens my heart and I can walk into a cafe, hand over a note and come out with coffee. The situation you offer instead requires the tourist to hold their euros in a euro bank which gives them a card, and when they go to the cafe, their own bank will convert the money, charging them a (probably excessive) fee to do so. Now mirror that back into the bitcoin case. The bitcoiner would have to hold their bitcoin in some exchange which had an attached VISA card (they exist). After all the recent "crypto" nonsense, even a non-bitcoiner ought to be able to see why that's a bad bad idea, and totally antithetical to the whole point of bitcoin. When retailers accept bitcoin, the win for me is that I get to use my self-custodied bitcoin as native money (from my point of view). The win for the retailer is that it's cheaper than VISA. They and I are happy, and you, meanwhile, just don't care (but that's up to you).

I'm in the position of having an elephant standing in front of me, while you continue to insist that an elephant can't, and never will, exist. I try to analyze your reason for believing this, but notwithstanding the outcome, the elephant continues to stand there anyway. You say that no real or proper business could accept bitcoin because the AML regulations would then preclude them from having a business bank account (I think). If I pretend that I'm a coffee shop thinking of using Coincorner checkout to accept BTC, and I look through your objections, I see no impediment. You say I'd have to keep proper records. Of course. All businesses have to keep proper records. It would be easier with BTC than cash. You say I'd have to comply with AML provisions that I'm not allowed to know. Well, I can't comment on that. You say that I'd have to convert to pounds. Of course; my suppliers will have to be paid from a sterling account. Coincorner will do that automatically and I still come out ahead on fees. Maybe I'm missing something, so let's admire the elephant: I told you that dozens of businesses close to me accept the contactless bitcoin card. They are 'proper' businesses. With the exception of a mobile fast food van, they have bricks and mortar, mostly on the high street. They will be companies and have bank accounts. I anticipate you might say that it's the Isle of Man and different, so let's look at London, where you said you were looking yourself. Sharps Pixley, bullion dealer Est. 1066 etc etc, accept bitcoin. I can see the advantage for them, they will charge 4-5% over spot for bullion, so the less of that they lose to bank charges the better. I quote from their website- "Clients can also purchase gold bars and coins using cryptocurrencies at the Sharps Pixley bullion shop at 54 St James Street. This is especially useful for smaller transactions and provides you with the opportunity to browse all our bullion products." You can't possibly claim that they are not a proper company or don't have a bank account. I anticipate that you might say that bullion companies are a special case because they already have strict KYC/AML in place. So let's look at 'normal' companies: Go to https://btcmap.org/map and navigate to London. You didn't say where you are, so I just clicked on a random place in central London. Eight outlets near my click, including two cafes, a jeweller in Hatton Garden, a vet and a music venue. I was pleased see the the venue already accepts contactless. If I'm quick I can go and see Taylor Swift. These are not self-employed pavement artists, or something. Every one will be a Ltd (or LLP for the vet) with an accountant, company returns and a business bank account. I'm citing hard evidence not vague assertions, while you just sit there and claim my comments are "well balls".

I feel as though I'm slowly making progress, we've gone from impossible to niche novelty... My version of the conversation: @scottbeard: unlikely that bitcoin will be useful to buy a sandwich. @sackot: I buy coffee, icecream, crepes, and sandwiches in local outlets with bitcoin. @staffknot: Impossible, it's not legal tender! No retailer would accept it! You were using a gift card and did not understand! @sackot: I used a contactless card from Coincorner, it transfers bitcoin directly from my wallet to theirs via Lightning. Here is a map of retailers currently accepting the Coincorner card. @staffknot: No genuine business would ever do this, because AML. No one I asked uses it. It's a massive niche novelty atm. Yes, its a novelty atm. You said yourself the card was only released earlier this year, what do you expect... I'm lucky that there are dozens of outlets within 20 miles of me, but that is not true in most places. One advantage for retailers is that it is cheaper than VISA. This could lead to wider adoption. Now, let's look at the first bit, AML. > Basically you need transaction transparency or where funds magically appear from in your accounts blows Ts & Cs of any genuine business account. If this were true, no retailer would accept cash. Retailers do accept cash. I don't know for sure how the rules work, but my understanding is that a business is perfectly free to accept cash/other non-AML payment, but obliged to report any transaction they deem suspicious. They're not going to do that for a three pound coffee, and why would they, what are they going to say?

Yes, I noticed decades ago that Warren Buffet does not understand gold. Gold is old enough that people who don't get it yet probably never will. Bitcoin is young and most of the information going around is FUD and nonsense. I just continue to hope that if I explain it clearly enough, someone somewhere will understand.

I hope you'll be successful with setting up your own server and connecting a card to it. In the meantime, if you want to play, go to lnbits.com where they offer all the functionality hosted on their own website. You can make a wallet, put sats in it, and enable payments with lnurl-withdraw, for example. Once you have a working system, you will need places to use it. I'm on the Isle of Man where there are dozens of places close to me, but there are some in the UK, depends where you are. The map below is hosted on the Coincorner website. It's a user-generated list and is not exhaustive. To use the card you're looking for a "coincorner checkout" logo. I've run out of allowed image size for this post, but go to http://www.thecubanembassymoseley.co.uk/news and scroll down a little to see an example. If you live near Birmingham and want to look cool while buying overpriced cocktails, look no further...

Your comment seems unresponsive to mine. > Hold on there in your rush to push that person must disclose any non- conversion as per sales in foreign currency. > Also your transaction needs logging and recording for VAT purposes in the payment currency. > There needs to be a transaction record and a trail that can be audited by a regulator. I didn't say the advantage of bitcoin is that you don't need to keep appropriate records for compliance, nor do I think that. I half-remember that the (opensource) LNbits has facilities to do it, but if not, there is no reason why it shouldn't. > You also just gave up all those supposed benefits of BTC to achieve it. > You literally outsourced the conversion to a fintech same as paying for a pint with your GBP Revolut card in a Spain. > There is nothing revolutionary here that requires BTC. I said that if you choose to use a third party, there are fees but they will be much smaller than VISA. This provides an incentive for retailers to use Bitcoin rather than VISA. I also said that you don't have to use a third party, you can do the whole thing yourself. Maybe you don't believe me? > The PoS is nothing to do with if you are paying BTC and just an alternate to VISA. I don't understand this. The whole point of the Lightning PoS is that it enables you to pay with bitcoin and the Lightning payment rail is massively more efficient, and so cheaper, than VISA.

In your hurry to dismiss Bitcoin I believe you are missing the point. Instead of discussing in the abstract what "paying in bitcoin" means, let's look at exactly what happens and why it seem significant to me. I wave a card at the retailer and bitcoin go from a Lightning wallet I nominate to a Lightning wallet they nominate. The payment rail is Lightning. I may have converted from pounds or I may already own bitcoin, only I know. They may convert instantly to pounds, or may keep the bitcoin, only they know. What is not involved? VISA are not involved. Banks may or may not be the ultimate repository at both ends, but are not involved in the payment. Lets assume what you are suggesting. I convert. The item is denominated in pounds (of course). They convert. At Coincorner, who they will probably be using, there is a 1% fee for the merchant (not just for the conversion, running the whole automated system). If they use VISA there will be, AIUI, something like a 3% fee. The Lightning fee is tiny, and for the merchant included in the Coincorner service. It's to the advantage of the merchant to use this rather than VISA. In the US there is a provider called Strike. Their fees are even lower. I suspect they can do that because they are providing both ends of the service, so don't even need to convert, just net out. Also they operate on a much larger scale. They don't operate in the UK yet, it keeps getting put back. The significance to me is that Bitcoin is providing the base layer of an extensible financial system, which is what it's for. Bitcoin is not supposed to depend on trusted third parties. The example above uses trusted third parties, but that isn't obligatory. Either end can just run their own nodes and wallets if they want to.

I was trying to make payments, but I would not be able to do either. The payment flow goes like this: You present to the merchant a URL which links to your Lightning node, and gives context which will persuade your node to trust it. The merchant presents that to your node along with an invoice requesting payment. Your node makes the payment. This is not all built into standard Lightning, so an extra layer is added called LNbits. It has useful facilities like presenting a virtual sub-wallet of your main wallet, which means I don't have to risk the whole content of my wallet to an experimental system. It does a lot of other things too. By default it uses Tor, to give security through obscurity. That won't do for the merchant, they need a normal IP address with an LNbits server behind it. LNbits produces the original URL, and includes the Onion address, but we need it to use a valid IP address instead. Doing that seemed to require adding something called reverse proxy to my main Apache setup, and changes in some address records at my internet provider. I got muddled and never got it to work right more than briefly. LNbits is written in Python, I tried to hack it to do what I wanted but I'm sure there is a proper way for people who understand the networking side. LNbits is a user-provided layer to solve real-life requirements. I believe some of the ideas are to be folded into Lightning proper in something called Bolt12, though the two are not at all the same in how and what they do. I've not got myself up to date on the details.