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Zero-amount or “amountless” Lightning invoice support!
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Soul ReaverSep 25, 2024
Majority of my personal use case is getting variable amounts over lightning from people. I really need ability to generate zero amount invoices on Alby Hub to use it. Or if there's any other current way to do it, w/ an app store app or something. I'd be happy to learn.
Thnx.
Comments
Hi, the best way to do this is to give people your lightning address. They can pay you variable amounts.
We need to include the lightning address on the receive page so it's easy to access, I think this should be implemented in the next release.
roland hi, yea, that's one thing. People mostly send me sats from Square Cash App and it's yet to receive lightning address support... I know this's more about other party's lack of willingness to keep up w/ Lightning improvements...
Soul Reaver You can use https://www.lnurlpay.com/ and create a link with your lightning address e.g. mine is https://www.lnurlpay.com/rolznz@getalby.com and just share this with people.
This is a cool app!
roland i tried it but it also has "Min 1 sat / Max 10000000 sats" limitation. If only lnurlpay.com could generate zero amount invoices.
Soul Reaver do you expect people to send you more than 10M sats? you should accept onchain transactions for these cases. Unless you create a very large lightning channel you won't be able to accept these payments anyway.
roland oh no that's not my concern, I'm just looking for sending people one single zero amount invoice for them to enter and pay however much they want. I'm selling things over lightning and people send some always changing variable amounts corresponding to the amount of the thing I'm selling that they need, so, zero amount invoices help a lot and remove friction of asking people to tell me how many sats they're planning to send or sending them an LN invoice generation page and asking them to enter amount of sats they'll be sending and generating a LN invoice. I'm currently mainly using BTCPay server w/ it's built in LND lightning node that I can generate zero amount invoices w/. Testing Alby Hub as well and might switch to that instead if I can figure out zero amount invoice generation.
Soul Reaver as far as we know BTCPayServer uses standard invoices. Would you be ok to share a link to your site so I can test creating an invoice?
roland I've not exposed BTCPay Server to web, I'm just using it's LND to generate zero amount invoices and sending to people.
Would it help if I were to send one of the 0 amount invoices from it instead?
Here's one w/ 24 hours expiration: