Alright, today I’m going to try to implement LNbits.

LNbits was suggested to me by the PlebPay dev yesterday on Twitter, and after a quick look at the options, it does seem to be the best option at the moment.

There’s even an LNbits plugin for WordPress, so that’s what I’ll try out today.

One thing that is becoming clear to me is that it’s actually not super easy to monetize a website with Lightning right now.

When I started this website last week, I honestly didn’t think the hardest part of setting it up would be figuring out lightning payments.

I saw Jack playing chess with PlebPay, and I just dove in headfirst. Didn’t think about payments any further.

I registered the domain and just started writing/building.

My goal was basically to set up a small blog where I can jot down my daily thoughts about bitcoin. I have a lot of thoughts, some good, mostly not good, and I just need a place to put them, get some quick feedback, and maybe earn some sats along the way.

At no point did I set out to create a blog about monetization with the lightning network.

I don’t even really like this topic, although it is turning into a fun puzzle to figure out.

However, since the entire point of this website is to earn sats for every post, being able to accept sats is kind of a necessary part of the project, so that’s what I’ll be working on for now.

I’m on a mission. No sats is not an option.

The lightning payments field is still nascent, which is crazy to realize given the exponential growth of the Lightning network, especially over the past year.

Now, I’ve been building websites for a long time, and I’ve been a bitcoiner for many years, so trust me, this is not the first time I’ve thought about monetizing a website with bitcoin.

But until recently, it just wasn’t possible.

I remember during/after the last bullrun there was a lot of talk about mining random cryptocurrencies via a browser extension or some other way of connecting a website to someone’s computer.

The basic idea was that a user would land on the website, agree to let their idle CPU capacity be used for mining, and then you could make bank by scaling up the website until you had an army of users mining for you for free.

I considered this option for about 30 seconds before I realized 2 things.

1. Nobody is going agree to do that. To much security risk and potential for scamming and downloading malware. I wouldn’t even agree to lets a random website use my CPU capacity. I’m sure some people out there did actually mine this way, but there’s no chance they scaled it and made any serious money. I could be wrong, but I would be very surprised if that ever happened.

2. Mining with CPUs is not profitable.

So I quickly forgot about that idea.

Back then (2018-ish?), Lightning was but a twinkle in some dev’s eye, so after considering and rejecting browser mining, I didn’t pursue website monetization further. There may have been options available that I wasn’t aware of, but at the time, I decided to move on to other projects and just forgot about the idea completely.

That is, until I saw PlebPay.

Now that website payments via lightning are possible, the purpose of this blog is coming into focus for me. I want to see how many sats I can earn per post, and to do that I will need to experiment with various lightning monetization methods.

Combined with what I know about website analytics, and given that lightning payments for the web are now possible, I’m going to optimize the bleep out of these posts.

If I have the right tools, I think I can turn this blog into a sat-stacking machine.

So the first order of business is to survey the landscape. I know about LNbits, but I just want to see what the big ol’ googie boy had to say about it.

From Googling around, I get the sense the landscape is grim and options are slim.

“Web monetization” is a term that is being used to refer to the ability to receive micropayments from visitors to a website. It’s not a new idea, but schemes that payout in bitcoin are rare.

From what I’m seeing out there, I may be one of the first people on the internet to even try to implement web monetization with lightning.

Which is odd considering that lightning is the ideal solution for this use case. You would expect people to be all over it.

But apparently not. Apparently, lightning implementations are still cutting edge in Q1 of 2022.

For example, check out how many downloads of the LNbits plugin there are on the wordpress marketplace right now:

There are fewer than 30 active installations and the plugin hasn’t been updated in 5 months.

If that metric is any indication of wider market adoption, then we’re early to the lightning monetization game. Super duper early.

Let me know in the comments if I’m wrong. Maybe there are a bunch of websites out there running LN payments that I’m just not aware of. I have been wrong in the past, IRRC. I was once wrong back in 1997 about the longevity of pogs as an investment for clout, for example.

There are a few other monetization schemes that may be worth exploring, but they don’t seem to use lightning directly.

For instance, someone named Tomomi Imura has a quick tutorial about how to set up a monetization scheme that pays out in bitcoin. But it involves linking a fiat monetization system to payment service that pays out in bitcoin.

Other website monetization schemes that payout in bitcoin but don’t seem to run 100% on lightning include:

1. https://cointraffic.io/

2. https://coil.com/

3. Hashnode has an implementation that may accept lightning, not sure.

Another downside to at least some of these schemes is that they require the user to have a browser that is specifically enabled to perform micropayments. Not great considering that a suprisingly high number of people on the internet still use Explorer from the early 2000s.

And agian, they run on fiat. That’s not quite what I’m after.

I want something that is lightning only, no fiat involved.

So that brings me back to LNbits. Time to stop yapping and get to work.

My first step was to install it. Done.

My second step was to activate it. Don–NOPE no there was a fatal error:

Now, LNbits is very much still in beta. So errors are bound to happen.

But at least a couple of dozen people have installed this plug-in successfully, so I was probably doing something wrong.

I checked out the gitlab repository, the LNbits.com website (which is great), and the youtube channel.

Just clicking around, I finally stumbled across this youtube video that at least gave me the basics of how to get started:

Once you click on the demo button on the landing page, you get to create a wallet and install everything as described in this video.

So that’s what I did.

Lo and behold – it worked!

Amazing. I love it when stuff just works.

The basic wallet just creates LN invoices that expire after 1 use, like any LN invoice.

But for this website, I need a way to generate a static invoice, aka, an invoice that can be used many times.

The nice thing about LNbits is that it is entirely open-source and free, so there is already a community of devs building interesting extensions for it.

I decided to try the Tip Jar extension first since that seemed to fit my use case best. I like that the tips can have messages attached.

This extension seems to be malfunctioning at the moment so I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t create any tip jars.

But that’s ok, because the second extension I tried was the LNURLp extension, which worked like a dream!

This extension is perfect for my use case. Using LNURL, I created a static lightning invoice with just a few clicks of a button:

For now, this is what I will use to monetize this website.

To send me some sats, just scan this QR code from a lightning-enabled wallet.

It seems to only work with BlueWallet so far. I’ve tried Stike and Muun Wallet as well, but those don’t seem to read LNURLs very well at the moment.

You can send me as much as you want, but the floor is set to 1 sat, so if you want to send me more than that, make sure to enter the amount manually.

So the answer to the question in the title of this post is = YES

Yes, it is possible to monetize a website with Lightning thanks to the amazing work that Ben Arc and the LNbits team are doing.

That’s all for this installment of the journey.

Now that I have successfully monetized the site, the next step is to optimize and improve the monetization.

The problem is that I don’t have enough traffic to really test anything out in a serious way, but I will continue writing posts and exploring other ways to monetize this site.

That should bring some eyeballs in eventually.