Bitcoin Forum

I would like to use the lightning network to pay for the membership. I haven't used it before so this would be an excuse to try something new.

Only via Grin and on-chain transactions for now.

Hmm. Weirdly enough, Bitcointalk does actually not support Lightning yet. It just makes sense that it should, knowing that Copper member is like more or less only $25.

Come on Theymos, stop slackin'.  :P

P.S. Probably move this thread to the Meta[1] section instead. The move option is on the bottom left part of this page.

---

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=24.0

Using the Lightning Network just to make one payment to purchase the copper membership isn't worth it. Unless you are using a custodial service like Blue Wallet that doesn't require the user to open his own channels. But even then you need a route to the copper membership node and Blue Wallet doesn't have one.

If you are opening and funding your own channel, you will have to pay a standard fee to open it. After that, you pay a base fee and fee rate (standard routing fee + a percentage of the total value being routed). To finalize the transaction, you need to broadcast another standard on-chain closing transaction.

To sum it up: You have paid 2 on-chain transactions instead of 1 and you paid additional LN fees on top of that.  

This is not possible yet, but IMO it should be a priority for theymos to implement.

IIRC, theymos has declined to implement LN because of the tax implications of running a LN node -- you would need to keep track of the bitcoin price anytime you received a 10 satoshi payment, and reported the <$0.01 payment accordingly. The above could be done via automation using a major exchange's API, or the forum's LN node settings could be set so that no LN fees will be charged for users to route transactions through the forum's LN channels (or the fees could be set insanely high).   

I suspect the time involved would not be justified by the number of people who would use it. Likely implementing Lightning would mean more users asking for help, and more things that theymos would have to solve manually. Neither of which I would guess are high on his wish list.