prashanthc

bitcoin

These are based on my personal experience running a Bitcoin technology company, working with accountants in the EU and the US, and many conversations I had with businesses recently.

1. **Account blocks:**

This, of course, is the most common problem, especially for businesses. If you are making transfers to exchanges to buy or sell bitcoin, you can expect a series of questions from your banks, or, worse, they may suspect you of providing crypto exchange services for your clients and may block your account.

This is a nightmare we as a bitcoin company were not spared with - we could not get an account on Revolut since we had bitcoin on our website and could not produce license documents. No way to communicate that we rely on our partners to provide services - of course, they won't spend time to read your terms and conditions or chat with you - they are too big to bother about small coffee shop owners or risky crypto apps.

2. **Accepting is just unclear.**

Businesses want to accept bitcoin and have a cleaner accounting trail- auto-offramp to Euro in some cases.

But they are confronted with setting up a BTCPay instance or dropping an NWC string or a lightning address to a payment tool.

Lightning address or NWC string is not as common as a bank's IBAN - still, they need to get one reliable Lightning setup.

But a business wallet is not a WOS you spin up for your friend to have their first sat. It should support Lightning, have liquidity, support good statement exports, be able to plug into existing account tools, and be either self-custody or compliant.

Even if you have an easy custodial wallet for your business, you are confronted with adding additional details to all the deposits from clients as part of the travel rule, which makes it a nightmare to accept bitcoin in a coffee shop for 10 euros.

3. **Accounting breaks**

Even if you manage to accept bitcoin, your account finds it incredibly hard to account for this, and also accounting for capital gains/loss comes with rate changes from the time of accepting and using this bitcoin.

Obviously you'll be using tools that will either not give a great export that you could use or plug into accounting software.

You'd need to hire crypto-expert accountants!

4. **Taxes**

You accept bitcoin - not sure about how this is treated from a tax perspective - if you auto-sell this incoming bitcoin to Euro - would the capital gain be 0 as you earned and instantly converted, or the first-in, first-out logic applied where you'd need to worry when you bought bitcoin to your wallet first time in ages.

It is not the willingness to pay taxes; it is knowledge of how to declare capital gains that comes with the bitcoin payments compliantly.

5. **Business custody is not personal custody.**

When you have multiple operators in an organization or a bigger company who have access to funds to spend on materials and services, you'd need governance and access to the funds.

Which gets way complicated with a self-custody wallet for business.

Bitcoin works - a free network - so cheaper payments, instant settlements and global acceptability.

All of these factors are a win for a business - but the banking, tooling, and process around it doesn't work. It does not make sense with all this friction.

I am building solution to address all the above - check out [https://bringin.app/business](https://bringin.app/business)

5 Problems for businesses to adopt bitcoin

news

lightning

Bitcoin is sovereign money. You should be able to move anywhere in the world and pay for anything with it.

In Europe, that wasn't possible. I started Bringin to change that.

I moved from India to Estonia with Bitcoin. Sending money from India to Estonia through the traditional system is a bureaucratic nightmare. Bitcoin was the only thing that moved freely.

That's when I realized that Bitcoin is a Sovereign Money that existed outside any system that could freeze it, block it, or take it away.

But when I tried to actually use it in Tallinn, pay rent, buy a flight, convert to euros for a holiday. The system around it was broken. Banks flagging transactions. Exchanges holding funds. Days of waiting.

Bitcoin always worked. Everything bridging it to the real world didn't.

Bitcoin has always been treated as three things: a stock to invest in, a vault to hide savings in, or a hill to die on. Almost no one tried to make it work as money; Which required to create a reliable Bitcoin to bank offramp - since many merchants wont accept bitcoin.

I quite my job, moved back to India, used all my bitcoin to bootstrap Bringin to solve this.

Bringin's web app came first, a dedicated euro vIBANs, instant and safe off-ramps, without the anxiety of bank blocks. A problem that needed solving before anything else could work.
Then we built a self-custody Lightning wallet, because instant settlement is what makes Bitcoin work as daily money. Lightning is key to actualising Bitcoin as money.

We shipped v1 of the app. A wallet, a vIBAN, and a debit card side by side. It worked - over 160 BTC of real flow, daily use across Europe. But it wasn't the frictionless experience we had promised. So we took it back. Rebuilt it from the ground up with feedback from the community.

This week, Bringin v2 is live across Europe.

**What's in v2**

**Wallet** — Built using Breez SDK with nodeless Spark implementation. 2-of-2 multisig at the protocol level — Bringin co-signs every transaction but cannot move funds alone. Every wallet ships with pre-signed exit transactions to Bitcoin L1, so users can exit unilaterally to mainchain anytime, without our cooperation. On-chain and Lightning live in one balance via Boltz submarine swaps. No channels to manage, no node on device. 5x faster and 70% cheaper than v1 (which was on Liquid).

**Lightning addresses** — Three addresses, three jobs:

* [yourname.btc@bringin.xyz](mailto:yourname.btc@bringin.xyz) — receives to self-custody wallet
* [yourname.card@bringin.xyz](mailto:yourname.card@bringin.xyz) — anyone on Lightning can top up the Bringin Visa from any wallet
* [yourname@bringin.xyz](mailto:yourname@bringin.xyz) — default, auto-converts incoming sats to euros in the vIBAN


**Bringin Connect** — Permanent Lightning-to-bank rail. Point a Lightning address at your existing Wise/Revolut/main bank and every send lands as euros in that bank. Reverse direction: standing order from bank to wallet for automatic DCA into self-custody, no app required.

**Off-ramp UX** — No order placement. Static QR linked to your bank. Scan it from any Lightning wallet, send any amount of sats, euros land via SEPA Instant.

**Visa card** — Two variants. Euro-balance card is straightforward. Bitcoin-balance card holds sats and converts at the moment of tap. The Bitcoin-balance side is custodial even though the wallet is self-custody —that’s what our users asked for. We're explicit about this distinction in the app.

Most compliant Bitcoin products make you hand over your keys to get a polished experience. We built Bringin to be both - fully regulated, instant SEPA, real IBANs, Visa cards, without ever compromising on self-custody, Bitcoin's core feature.


Bitcoin. Euros. Card.

Three balances, all first-class. Bitcoin isn't a feature inside a euro app. Euros aren't an off-ramp buried under a Bitcoin wallet. Both held by you. Both spendable.

This is the first app I know of built on one idea: Bitcoin and euros aren't competing currencies. They're two halves of money in the dual money era that we are currently in — one for sovereignty, one for daily life.

Three years. One mission. Make Bitcoin usable - today

Check it out: https://bringin.app

Bitcoin always worked. Bridging it to the real world didn't. So I built Bringin.

You can now withdraw euros from your LN node to your bank account – in seconds

If you try to live on Bitcoin like I do - you'd want to convert to Euros momentarily to pay for goods and services. 

Merchants can accept bitcoin without needing to hold bitcoin which allows more bitcoin adoption by giving ways to instantly offramp to Euros.

If you're running ThunderHub to manage your Lightning node, there's a new feature worth checking out – native Euro withdrawals, directly to your bank.

For anyone who doesn't know ThunderHub – it's an open-source Lightning node management tool used by thousands of node operators. Clean interface, great for managing channels, payments, and now fiat withdrawals too.

The way it works: on Bringin, you create a "Sell Connection" – enter your bank details, choose Lightning or on-chain, and you get a permanent address linked to your bank account. You can even set up a custom Lightning address for it.

From there, any Bitcoin sent to that address gets automatically converted to euros and lands in your bank. No app to open, no extra login. Just send and receive.



![](https://m.stacker.news/137862)

I started Bringin to make Bitcoin spendability seamless – and this is one step closer to that mission. The infra behind this is called Bringin Connect, which lets any wallet or node tool plug into European banking rails without building it themselves. ThunderHub is one of the first to go live with it.

If you're a node operator, worth giving it a try. If you're building a wallet or payment tool and want to plug into something like this – happy to chat.

When we spend, we want instant finality. When we earn, we want maximum value. Lightning gives us both instant settlement + negligible fees.

Seven years in, the network has grown to 16k nodes, 75k channels, and 4,200 BTC capacity. Adoption is rising, tools are maturing, and merchants from Square to Steak' n Shake are seeing real gains.

I argue Lightning’s bigger role isn’t just burgers and coffees — it’s becoming the B2B settlement layer of the 21st century. Think SWIFT, but swifter.

Full piece here: https://newmoneymatters.substack.com/p/the-fastest-horse-in-the-race-wins

Curious, do you see Lightning scaling more as a consumer tool or as institutional plumbing?

⚡️ Lightning: The Fastest Horse in Payments

The Buyer Pays Fiat, The Seller Receives Sats, How?

Fabs

We built a demo where an AI agent buys an eSIM and pays using Bitcoin. The payment is made from a Euro balance using Lightning. No credit card,—just AI transacting in Bitcoin. Here’s what happens in the demo:

-> The AI picks the best eSIM plan (Rigged for the Demo)
-> It makes a Bitcoin payment over Lightning
-> It uses a Euro balance to send sats

This works using:
-> Lightning for instant and cheap transactions
-> Bringin APIS exposed via MCP Model context protocol

Bitcoin is internet-native money. AI agents will need a way to transact, and Bitcoin is the best fit. But there are scaling issues with Bitcoin and being able to provide secure controlled access.

That's where Lightnign and Nostr Wallet Connect come into the picture. They enable instant, cheap payments with controlled secure access to AI to make payments. Bitcoin adoption is not keeping up with AI development.

Most AI services are still stuck with fiat payment rails—slow, expensive, and restrictive. That’s where on/offramp providers should step in. Like how Bringin is doing.

I also wrote a blog post breaking down how Bitcoin can power AI payments. Check it out here:
https://medium.com/bringin/bringin-bitcoin-to-ai-684e744b6795


![](https://m.stacker.news/85917)


AI Paying with Bitcoin and lightning – A Working Demo

We built a demo where an AI agent buys an eSIM and pays using Bitcoin. The payment is made from a Euro balance using Lightning. No credit card,—just AI transacting in Bitcoin. Here’s what happens in the demo:

-> The AI picks the best eSIM plan (Rigged for the Demo)
-> It makes a Bitcoin payment over Lightning
-> It uses a Euro balance to send sats

This works using:

-> Lightning for instant and cheap transactions
-> Bringin APIS exposed via MCP Model context protocol

Bitcoin is internet-native money. AI agents will need a way to transact, and Bitcoin is the best fit. But there are scaling issues with Bitcoin and being able to provide secure controlled access.

That's where Lightnign and Nostr Wallet Connect come into the picture. They enable instant, cheap payments with controlled secure access to AI to make payments. Bitcoin adoption is not keeping up with AI development.

Most AI services are still stuck with fiat payment rails—slow, expensive, and restrictive. That’s where on/offramp providers should step in. Like how Bringin is doing.

I also wrote a blog post breaking down how Bitcoin can power AI payments. Check it out here:
https://medium.com/bringin/bringin-bitcoin-to-ai-684e744b6795

What are your thoughts? Does AI need Bitcoin?

![](https://m.stacker.news/85189)

Education

I started my newsletter a few months ago with the title - "New Money Matters"

My second edition was - Why Does Money Fail  Part -1, walking through the history of money and how it evolved.

In this edition, I explore the rise (and cracks) of electronic money:

1) How it revolutionized payments but widened global inequalities.
2) The dangers of government overreach and programmable money.
3) Why the current system leaves billions behind—and what comes next?

This is more than a history lesson—it’s a call to action. The future of money needs sound principles, and Bitcoin might just hold the key.

📖 Read the full piece:  https://open.substack.com/pub/newmoneymatters/p/why-does-money-fail-part-2

Let’s rethink money together. I am super curious to know your thoughts!

#NewMoneyMatters #Bitcoin #FinancialEducation

Why Does Money Fail?

A tale of an immigrant risking it all to drive Bitcoin adoption in Europe

Hey, I wanted to share my story on starting Bringin.

It's been two years since I started working on Bringin(bringin.xyz) after facing issues with liquidating my Bitcoin, which I used to receive part of my payment.

I left my job, returned back to India, and sold all my Bitcoin in late 2022, probably at the worst price to bootstrap Bringin. Being a solo founder, building in a regulatory environment and the bear market market. It was a serious struggle to enter the EU, even if a tourist Visa was rejected twice. With all the odds stacked against me, it was a rough 2023.

I anyways wanted to get Bringin up and running at any cost. Received some 10k checks here and there. It was mostly in 2023, and it got better in early 2024.

Today, we have onboarded 650 users and processed around 7 Bitcoins. All organically, pushing content that helps the community. Raised funds from users and angels (raised 100k from 8 angels) and still kept the project alive and growing.

While being involved in this process, the founder of Striga, Prashanth, our present partners, a company that I used to work for, decided to write a blog post about my journey so far.

Here is the link for that: https://medium.com/@32bitblast/bringin-x-striga-a-bold-tale-of-an-immigrant-risking-it-all-to-drive-bitcoin-adoption-in-europe-bf4b6e1b445f

Today, Bringin has a dedicated IBAN for safer transfers and Lightning for instant payments. Spending Bitcoin can not get easier than this.

Bitcoin is the first-ever digital bearer asset, and having access to a wallet's private keys signifies ownership of the Bitcoin in the wallet. Storing bitcoin in an exchange or with a custodian may give you the illusion of ownership, but it is only an IOU from the custodian who owns the underlying asset.

Anyone who cares about security and ownership should understand hardware wallets and how they give actual ownership and secure your Bitcoin. 

Published a blog post - An Overview of Hardware Wallets!

This blog post introduces hardware wallets, provides an overview of the various types of wallets, and outlines best practices for transacting with hardware wallets.

If you find it useful, please share it with others. If you would like to get these valuable resources into your inbox once a month, please subscribe to our newsletter.

Link: https://bringin.xyz/blog/resources/overview-of-hardware-wallets/


![](https://m.stacker.news/33160)


An Overview of Hardware Wallets

0310c281a9

That's a great factor, and we will include them in the next version.