I think the lightning network is great at handling payments for software. We have built a small tool and selling it for 1$/month through regular credit card processing is just a pain. There’s the processing service that takes a cut, then money reaches the bank after some days, another cut, then after all that they pretty much freeze at any point.

Granted, it’s a rather improved process than about 20 years ago, where selling my first software involved receiving an actual cheque in the mail, then waiting 30+ days for the bank to finally clear it, after taking a big commission of course.

Compare this to running my own lightning node on a raspberry pi in the office, and receive the money instantly… it’s just from another galaxy. What I did was implement a custom solution for generating invoices and processing them through the website (something like btcpayserver seemed overhead, I wanted to fiddle myself with it). The fiat price now has 1$ extra to cover for all the headackes involved. I think this will be the way forward… regular price for bitcoin transactions, and penalty fees for fiat legacy rails.

If you’re curios how it works, have a look at the website at https://theclicker.app. Order is generated on the website, picked up by the raspberry pi, an invoice is generated through lnd’s RPC, posted back to the site which displays the lnurl code + qr code for convenience. Running something like Alby in the browser makes the whole process seamless and can be done in basically seconds. Email is needed just for order confirmation, practically there’s no personal information required for the transaction.

I hope to see more payment options popping up like this, feels like a win-win for both sides of the transaction.