Category: Bitcoin/Lightning/Crypto

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Integrating BTCPayServer

Do you want to accept Bitcoin and BTC/Lightning Network payments? Don’t make a quick decision thinking it will be a piece of cake implementation just because your Umbrel or Start9 Embassy has a one-button install. Just like any business tool implemented, you will want to be prepared. This provides some of the questions we ask our clients about how they want to run their implementations.

  • What is your estimated volume? Low (1-500 month), Medium (501-2500), High (2501 and up)
  • What system is btcpayserver hosted on or do you need us to provide a hosting platform?
    • Are you self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi via Umbrel, Start9, Nodl, Casa or other? If so, give thought to physical node security as well as bandwidth if you run a busy store with lots of transactions.
    • Are you hosting on a VPS system? Security needs to be hardened, as well as enough resources deployed.
  • Are you connecting to your own lightning node to facilitate payments?
    • If so, is it installed and running? 
    • If not your own node, are you using a service such as opennode or lnpay?
    • If connecting to your own lightning node, is it accessible via clearnet (www.mysite.com for example) or is it on tor onion site?
    • If on tor, do you have a VPS host so reverse tor proxy can be configured?
  • What system will be processing via btcpayserver? ( WooCommerce, Shopify, etc)
    • Will you need this system configured for the btcpayserver connection?

These are many of the questions that will help us understand your business model to adequately provision a system for your needs.

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Bitcoin and Lightning Network and Point of Sale Payments Integration

As a business owner, you want to see what this Bitcoin thing is all about and want to integrate its payments into your infrastructure. Doing all of this can be daunting if you’re not tech-inclined or if you’ve got other tasks to manage. This is where MBC can help out.

Bitcoin is in the beginning stages of becoming a monetary standard, a store of value and a method of payment and exchange. This article won’t get into the details of why and how (plenty out there to get your information but I recommend reading Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard as a good first step), but will provide a few options of what to do in general to incorporate it in your business.

Bitcoin as a method of payment is built on two payment rails currently: 1)Bitcoin – the main chain and 2)Lightning Network – the 2nd layer. The Bitcoin layer makes up the blockchain (the public ledger) and records transaction every ten minutes on average and has a higher cost of transaction. The Lightning Network (a 2nd layer or subordinate layer to Bitcoin) is a faster and chearper way to send transactions. Both layers have their benefits but I will focus on Lightning for the speed and the low cost of transactions for the remainder fo this article for business-use case.

Lightning Network payments are based on bitcoin but are transacted on the sublayer 2 network. These transactions are “off-chain” and hence fast (completed and confirmed in a few seconds) and cheap (fractions of a % fees generally). Businesses integrate Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments together with various tools including BTCPayServer and LNBits. These tools have integrations to point of sale front-ends such as WooCommerce and BTCRetailX (our point of sale offering). It’s fascinating technology and it’s ready for commercial use.

Unless you have the bandwidth, managing a lightning node takes effort, energy and money. If you want to take on this roll, MBC can assist with the setup. It’s an honorable endeavor if you choose to go that route as you support the Lightning Network by doing so. You also have 3rd party options such as opennode to provide tthe lightning channel management on their side and just provide the proceeds back to you, along with their transaction fees (which is substantially cheaper than traditional credit cards).

MBC has the skills to install and manage your own nodes of bitcoin core and lightning network as well as integrating these payments into your legacy or new tech systems.

Please reach out to us for a quote and business review.

Doug

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