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! image

Replies (12)

Lol, halfway through reading I was like “nice, that is super easy” I’ve checked all the boxes except for installing a plug-in and updating my profile 😂. Although custodial zaps are easier, the future for sovereign zaps looks bright.
You've done the hard stuff so you can get there if you want to. BTCPay server is like magic and does so many things well. Getting up and running with BTCPay takes some work but once you have it running and have a Lightning Node connected the LN Address and Nostr parts are easy.
This is because the fee is too high as a percentage of the total payment. I can Zap you via the Core Lightning CLI. I suspect I can put something in the Core Lightning config to have the small payments be reliable as long as I'm willing to pay routing fees that are greater than the actual invoice amount.