Just gave the new bolt12 feature on Phoenix Wallet app a test and it's great! Having a contact list in the app where you can instantly pay people without having to ask for an invoice is awesome.

This makes a lot of sense for anyone you regularly pay to or receive from, and is especially cool for the donation use case.

For years, people were trying to teach users not to post up single bitcoin addresses, and BIP47 PayNyms typically requires a notification transaction and it's on chain etc so it was more clunky and not as seamless.

Now (or arguably, soon), a person who wants to take donations can put up a single bolt12 QR or string, and instantly take lightning donations. (caveat: needing more wallets and services supporting send-to-bolt12)

Phoenix handles all the channel management in the background. Yes you pay a fee for that, but so be it, people have to make money and be sustainable.

It'll be interesting to see if this enables more people to 'stay off chain' rather than having to do the clunky management of having some on chain hot funds and some off chain hot funds.

From here, we still need to see more wallets that support bolt12 but it looks like Zeus Wallet will have it soon, LDK has it, and CLN will get it (which presumably means support soon in Greenlight and Breez SDK?) I know Ocean Mining also supports bolt12 payouts, so this will be interesting to see from that perspective too.

We're finally getting closer to that seamless LN experience that people were dreaming of in earlier years. I still remember when rusty gave his talk at LNConf in Berlin, perhaps Oct/Nov of 2019 talking about this stuff. It's been a few years but it's finally feeling real now!