Alby Hub is lightning-node software that Get Alby sells as a service. It's also free and open source. You can run it on a node such as Umbrel or Start9. I even was able to run it on Ubuntu. I was lucky enough to try the Alby Hub early. I even tested the software as a service before it was released to the public. I "forgot my password," though. Actually, I never knew it. I use VaultWarden as a password manager and copy and paste all my passphrases. I was in a Jitsi meeting. You know how it is. Bitcoiners are super interesting smart people. I got distracted talking to these smart people and must have copied and pasted the wrong passphrase because...I got distracted. I opened a channel and then got locked out. It's my fault. I take complete responsibility. I take complete responsibility. I hadn't even written down my seed phrase yet.

I didn't lose any sats though; aside from the 10,000 sats, it cost me to open up the channel. This is because I am very careful about sending larger sums of bitcoin to wallets before I write down the seed or test them. I might send 21,000 SATs or something like that to see if I can recover them before I send more. We used to say "don't be reckless," but that ethos can get lost in all the excitement of this cutting-edge technology we call the lightning network. If I sent thousands of dollars of bitcoin to this Alby Hub wallet I was beta testing, those sats would have been HODLED forever. It is important to use new technology with small amounts of bitcoin. It is important to use new technology with small amounts of bitcoin." This way, you mitigate your risk of a catastrophic loss. This is especially true if you ever find yourself beta-testing.

The Bright Side of Forgetting My Passphrase on Alby Hub

)

There is an orange lining to this story. The other beta tester in the meeting got it to work. He played a game called Zappy Bird. This is not an endorsement of Zappy Bird. I think it's a gambling version of Flappy Bird. I am not a gamer, and I would just lose my seat if I played this for any length of time. This allowed me to see the possibilities of Alby Hub, however, even though I screwed up my first try. My mother, like many of your mothers, I'm sure, always said, "If at first you don't succeed, then try again."

" Even though it didn't work for me at first, I got a glimpse into how awesome Alby Hub was anyway. Even though it didn't work for me at first, I got a glimpse into how awesome Alby Hub was anyway. That motivated me to try again. The second time I Alby Hub on PopOS! by following the instructions on the README file. That worked. It was surprisingly easy, but we were in the early days, and my channel was force closed. The issue seems to be fixed now that it's released to the public. I'm amazed at how much cleaner it is now. I also had a few other problems connecting my node to my Alby account because it was connected to the original node. The good people at Get Alby fixed that, however. I'm really impressed with their customer service. Screwing up my first node gave me the opportunity to learn this about the company.

Screwing up my first node gave me the opportunity to learn this about the company. I continued to use the GetAlby API during this time. I continued to use the GetAlby API during this time. I thought API's were super scary. 3 I don't even know what API stands for. Thanks to some of the people like Bitkarrot from Plebnet.dev, I am comfortable using them. A few weeks ago, I was able to make some video tutorials that teach businesses how to accept bitcoin. I am aware most businesses prefer fiat. It occurred to me: why would a business care if the fiat in their bank account comes from Strike or Mastercard? Of course, businesses that want to accept bitcoin can keep the sats. One business owner I know who is listed on BTCmaps did not want to use Strike because he liked seeing the stats on his phone.

Get Alby On Umbrel Or Start9

As I eluded to earlier, you can now run GetAlby on Start9 or Umbrel. They have videos and guides in[ ]this tutorial](https://guides.getalby.com/user-guide/v/alby-account-and-browser-extension/alby-hub/alby-hub-flavors/umbrel-start9-etc). If you already have one of these machines laying around and are comfortable getting your fingers dirty in the command line, you should try it. If not, you should try the software as a service. If you're a command-line ninja, run it on Ubutnu. Don't be reckless. Only use amounts you are willing to lose. Ably doesn't have access to your seeds, but it is still a hot wallet. It is also still very new. Expect bugs. Expect channel closures. Don't just be a whinny complainy-pant about it. Help improve it. Make a pull request if you must. If you are not as technical. Don't worry. They plan to be on the Umbrel and Start9 app stores soon.

Alby Hub on Umbrel or Start 9 require the Lightning Node app. If you self-hose, your seed is on your Lightning Node app. Write these 24 words down and keep them safe. You will need these to recover your bitcoin in case something breaks. If you use the cloud service, follow the directions to back up your keys here. Opening a channel is easy. You just send the 10,000 sats or whatever the fee is to open it. It's a node in the cloud service similar to voltage, I suppose. To be honest, I'm not sure how it works on the back end, but this abstracts away much of the complexities of running your own lightning node. You don't need to worry about finding a node to connect to, inbound liquidity, or balancing channels. That's like full-time IT work. Alby Hub makes running a lightning node easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Alby Hub makes running a lightning node easy-peasy lemon squeezy. This opens bitcoiners up to a world of possibilities.

Why I Am So Excited About Alby Hub

Although I did some beta testing for GetAlby's Alby Hub, I didn't receive any sats from them aside from a couple zaps here and there, but this is not a paid ad or sponsored blogpost. I don't think I can make a better guide than they have on their website. I am excited about Alby Hub because it makes accepting bitcoin so easy. I am excited about Alby Hub because it makes accepting bitcoin so easy. I'm not sure your grandmother could do it, but most computer-literate people could easily run Alby Hub. But wait... There's more.

Thanks to these wonderful people on nostr, I learned how to find my keys in the lightning node of my Umbrel. This also means my lightning node works for other apps besides Alby Hub. It also works with the LNbits installed on my Umbrel. I bet it works with BTCpayServer too, but I haven't verified this yet. This means businesses will soon be able to accept bitcoin by:

• Buying a $400 minicomputer like Umbrel or Start9 ($800).
• • Using Alby Hub in the Cloud and integrating it into other clients that use Nostr Wallet Connect
• • Setting up an online bitcoin store on Shopster or Plebeian Market will be easy.
• -+ The Uncle Jim Model just got 10x easier.

For example, what if I sold LNBit's POS extension and gave someone access to use my LNBits as a POS? shop could use LNBits as a POS terminal all of a sudden. I could build a bitcoin POS system for a local business using old comouters in my strategic computer reserve. Okay, I admit it. I'm a computer hoarder. I never recycle old computers unless they are unrepairable. There are so many ways to use the lightning network now. Find out more at https://getalby/hub. We can use these tools in creative ways. What if, instead of using BTCpayServer to help businesses accept bitcoin, we create a BTCpayServer-like product list on Shopster instead?

Using Alby Hub to Monetize My Blog

As I thought more about this, it occurred to me I should start a business with all of this stuff. Some people at my local meetup have asked me to help them set up a lightning node. Tools exist that make it easy enough to do consulting for anyone over tools like Keet or Hivetalk.org/. I also want to sell T-shirts. I've had the idea to sell bitcoin t-shirts that say Pay Me In Bitcoin. This one time, I played poker in Vegas during Def-Con. I was there for poker at the time. I've never been to DefCon. Some nerd had a QR code on his T-shirt. I'm not sure what it was. It was the first time I ever saw a QR code.

I was able to design this T-shirt with the help of Dell E 3. I'm using some of the techniques I learned in the 4-hour workweek to design this shirt, but instead of hiring a graphic designer in a third-world country, I hired computer power from PayPerQ. A website I learned about on getalby.com. Around the time of the halving, some dude at my job asked me if I think he'll ever be able to afford a whole bitcoin for each of his kids. I said I didn't know. He told me he makes way more than my family, but he hasn't started stacking SATs yet. He also told me he pays for Chat GPT because it is "only $30 a month." That's $360 of sats he could have stacked per year. I wouldn't be surprised if $360 stacked in bitcoin is worth $3,600 in five years.

Many people who say they will never spend bitcoin often spend money on other fiat things because they were raised with a hyper-consumer mental framework. Many others think AI will kill us like the Terminator, but people like Andreas Antonopolis and Paul Vigna wrote books about bitcoin getting used as a medium of exchange for AI almost a decade ago. The lightning network was clunky and difficult back when I first ran a MyNode and entered my public key into yalls.org to write about bitcoin. I bought a sticker from Blockstream with the Eclair Wallet back then, but it was hard to see how the lightning network could come over the technical hurdles for the majority of the people.

Tools like Alby Hub give me hope for the future. I listened to Natalie Brunell's Coin Stories this morning. The guest is a gold bug. She said something my wife is even still concerned with. The government will never allow bitcoin to be used for payments. They will capture it before this happens.

She is right in a sense. I am sure the governments of the world will not want to give up the power to print money and expand and contract the economy as they see fit. The digital alternative to central banking will not be welcomed by governments. Plebs build it anyway. The government of the United States has the most powerful weapons ever known to humankind. This government has an arsenal big enough to destroy the world many times over. I'm not certain bitcoin will survive an existential event such as this. I do not doubt the POTUS could Executive Order 6102.2 every Saturday in the ETF's overnight. To ban tools that make it easy to use the bitcoin lightning network as payments requires banning computers and banning software distributed all over the world. It seems like governments would have a difficult time banning computers.

Now that I think of it, Natalie Brunel could use Alby Hub to accept steaming sats and boosts to her podcast. She can host it in the cloud or on a plug and play node like Umbrel or Start9.

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I began writing this blog before zaps existed. I used the LNBits demo version to create a tip jar I added to the end of my blogs on Ghost. I didn’t make a ton of sats, but it felt great to get tips every now and then. We will get back to this tip jar in a minute, but in the beginning, I wrote about my half-assed attempts to orange pill merchants at my local farmers market. I didn’t have a plan. I just walked up to random women selling zucchini and asked, “do you accept bitcoin?”

Out of a hundred people I asked, only one person said yes.

I now to to a brewery that accepts bitcoin using the Aqua Wallet. This works, but we haven't figured out how to allow him to accept bitcoin when the owner of the brewery isn't there. I think I found the answer. The brewer can print out a QR code with a single Liquid address. Anyone with the address can see the amount of fees paid on each transaction. They will see how many transactions were associated with this address, but they won't be able to see the amounts of the transaction. The butcher can buy a beer using this address. The baker can also buy a beer with this address. The brewer knows how much the baker and the butcher paid, but the baker cannot see the amount the butcher paid and vice-versa.

The employees will also not be able to see how much customers pay, but the baker can reveal the amount by clicking the View unblinded transaction in Explorer.

The amount paid is shown on the sent page, so the bartender(an employee of the brewer) can verify the payment went through as well as the total amount. Of course the amount is denominated in L-BTC. If the bartender needs to know how much this amount of sats is worth in dirty fiat, she can use the sats converter webpage from plebnet.dev. In this example, 1,838 sats equals $1.07 at the time of this writing. We simply convert the decimal to sats by removing all the zeros. This is very easy and requires very little technical know-how.

Coinos

nostr:naddr1qqr5wmzcvedysnczyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcg02j4f

We can also create a Point of Sale Service. Coinos is the easiest way to do this and they charge a very small fee. also creates a nostr key. You could use this to advertise your business on nostr, a decentralized communications protocol where a lot of people who like spending bitcoin on the Internet hang out. You can also use Coinos to obtain a lightning address. Lightning addresses look like an email address, but people send you sats instead. Here is a 16 minute video I created to teach you how to use Coinos as a bitcoin payment terminal. Coinos

nostr:naddr1qqr5wmzcvedysnczyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcg02j4f

BTCpayServer

BTCpayServer let's you set up bitcoin wallets in several interesting ways. You can use Greenlight to create a self custodial lightning wallet using a key made of 12 valid BIP39 words(also known as a regular bitcoin wallet). There's no need to find liquidity or run any specialized hardware. I suppose you don't even need to run a node, but you should do that anyway. The easiest way to set up BTCpayServer is to deploy it on LunaNode. This is my favorite way to run it because it has the best uptime and gives me the least headaches. It costs about $15.00 per month which adds up to $180 per year. That get's expensive over a while.

You can also run it on a $400 computer from Umbrel too. I can only get the payments to work on my local network and TOR however. I learned how to host it on the clearnet(also known as the normal Internet) using CloudFlare, but the payments won't work on BTCpayServer for some reason.

I was also able to run LNBits on the clearnet using Start9 but this instance does not allow us to install the required plugins we need to run these fancy nodes in the cloud. It is the same instance that you see on the BTCpayServer Demo site. I'm not sure why they are different. This is not a complaint My Start9 is a bad ass computer. It also lets me host websites out of my closet on the clearnet.

BTCpayServer has several interesting features.

• Sell downloadable tutorials
• Instantly convert bitcoin to dollars(or your local national currency) using the Strike plugin
• Run a Custodial Lightning Wallet in the cloud using Greenlight.
• Create a store on Shopify or WordPress
• Automatically delete customer information every two weeks.

BTCpayServer is for those who want to run a bad ass bitcoiner business for bitcoiners by bitcoiners.

How To Use BTCpayServer with the Strike API

nostr:naddr1qqr4q3m9fe34wdgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygr4hu34xxhflxxx9x2m5pcereygat28t96nw8tr6l0ag677r0agj5psgqqqskasw0nrwh

How To Use BTCpayServer with Greenlignt with the Breez Plugin

nostr:naddr1qqr4jsmv2e6n2tgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygr4hu34xxhflxxx9x2m5pcereygat28t96nw8tr6l0ag677r0agj5psgqqqskassqw0d5

LNBits

LNBits has a new feature. It allows us to sell our software as a service. We can become an uncle Jim. I run an instance of LNBits using an API from getalby. I also have the GetAlby Hub, but have not switched API's yet. We can also use other API's like from ZBD or opennode. I run mine on Start9 and it works over the clearnet, although I hope to use a reverse TOR proxy soon. It's easy to run on an old Linux computer. They have great docs If you don't want to bother with that, you can also run this on Start9 or Umbrel.

Sell Extentions As A Service

The most interesting thing about LNBits is that it allows you to sell software as a service. This is a little known fact, but it's an interesting way to turn our nodes into a software as a service business. Bitkarrot mentioned this on this episode of Bitcoin Audible. Ben Arc also announced it on Citadel Dispatch. I'm going to sell extensions for 10,000 sats. I don't expect to make much money. I would consider myself lucky if I earned enough to buy a cup of coffee, but this is an interesting concept. Keep in mind, this is a custodial service. I use an Alby API. Don't keep to many sats on this. Treat it like a cash register. You You should withdraw your sats to self custody every day like a business empty's it's cash register out every day and puts the cash in a safe.

LNBits POS Tutorial

nostr:naddr1qqrkcaj5xqchyugzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcr947q9

If you want to accept bitcoin at a shop, try it here.

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Fiat is my only shitcoin. I am a shitcoin minimalist. The problem is, most people don’t want bitcoin. Most corporations are fiat maxis. Most business owners are fiat maxis. To be honest, most bitcoiners care more about the fiat price than running a node. Most bitcoiners also feel as if they don’t have enough, myself included. The problem with using bitcoin as a medium of exchange is the coincidence of wants. Bitcoiners don’t want to spend bitcoin. Shops want fiat. There is no coincidence of wants. The corporations don’t want to mess around with converting their payment terminals into a bitcoin accepting machine.

• They don’t want to spend time training employees how to use bitcoin.
• They Think it’s bad for the environment unless you mine bitcoin with Tesla batteries or something.
• It’s too slow.
• There are only 7 transactions per second…

They’re wrong, but the suits are still stuck with 2015 arguments.

I still believe we can use the lightning network to pay for coffee. This can be done very easily. I will not need every business around me to accept bitcoin. I don’t need them to HODL. I just need about ten places near me, where I can spend my bitcoin.

Strike Tried To Fix This

A couple years ago, Jack Mallers told Matt Odell we would soon be buying groceries at WholeFoods and cheeseburgers at Wendy’s. He built it like the Field of Dreams, but they didn’t come. It could totally work, but they just don’t get it and like Satoshi said, “If you don’t get it or don’t believe me, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to convince you.”

https://fountain.fm/clip/rOwhyibbPOTehTXSfwPY

Maybe we can't buy overpriced groceries at Whole Foods yet, but it is possible to add Strike to some payment terminals like Clover. How would that work though? “Hi. I’ve listened to more bitcoin podcasts than anybody you know. May I please hack your Clover machine so I pay you in bitcoin?”

It's not going to work.

I know the government collects a sales tax( A.K.A. capital gains). According to the chapwood index, inflation is not much less than this sales tax where I live. It was even higher than 15% for a while. The point is, I want to spend bitcoin. Fewer businesses accept bitcoin than American Express. There is no coincidence of wants and most business owners don’t want me hacking their point of sale machines.

BTCpaySigns

Bitcoin is awesome, but few understand this. Most people don’t want to put in the 100 hours to learn about bitcoin. It’s a sign of the times. Speaking of signs, most businesses understand them. Here are businesses that sell signs to no-coiners. People like signs. I read that most people choose fast food restaurants by signs in Fast Food Nation. Signs are an old idea. We see then on the road and at brick and mortar businesses.

Apps are also ubiquitous. It occurred to me that I can pay a shopkeeper by using a lightning address they obtain from Strike. I can also pay them with their Strike Tipping page at https://stike.me/theirstrikeusername. For example, you can send the personwith the username Odell sats on strike at https://strike.me/odell. I haven't verified this username belongs to the person behind npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx. Regardless, the business owner receives the sats right away, but he or she can choose to accept incoming payments in bitcoin or fiat. Of course, I think they should keep the sats and put them into self-custody, but I don’t have time to convince anybody.

Here is an example of how this sign works.

My goal is to find 10 local small business that will allow me to pay for coffee, groceries, or hamburgers using bitcoin. I'm not trying to orange pill Starbucks. I want other people to do this too.

Here's the plan.

1. Onboard a local business onto Strike. Show them how to use it. Don't try to convince them. Let them accept dollars or bitcoin. If they choose dollars and bitcoin does what we think it will, we won't need to convince them.

2. Make them a sign, or buy one from https://btcpaysigns.com and I will make you one. I'll just need the Strike Username.

3. Pay with bitcoin. If you prefer to pay with fiat, for tax purposes, or because you don't hace enough bitcoin, use the Strike app yourself. You can also keep fiat on the Stike app while using the ligntning network as a payment rail. It will turn your dirty fiat into bitcoin and give the business owner the form of payment they prefer.

4. Bring them business. Bring a meetup to the business. Put them on BTCpayMaps.org. Let all the bitcoiners you know they accept bitcoin. If accepting bitcoin does not bring the business more customers, they will not have an incentive to adopt the bitcoin standard.

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