Bitcoin Connect and Nostr

It's been a busy week with being at IDBC (I was one of the judges there hackathon there - congratulations to the winners and finalists! as well as being on two panels - V4V and lightning apps) and did another session with Bumi for BOLT FUN Legends of Lightning, where we again covered Nostr Wallet Connect (which some of the Bitcoin Connect connectors are powered by!)

Speaking of Nostr Wallet Connect - we received some interest in Bitcoin Connect from famous Nostr developer PABLOF7z who said:

this is VERY cool; I'm going to use it a lot! thanks @bumi!

Also, futurepaul from Mutiny created some issues on the Bitcoin Connect repository with the hope to add Bitcoin Connect to Zapple Pay (and I believe their new AutoZap zap subscription service). I have used Zapple Pay a lot on Damus when the zap button was disabled by Apple - I think this is a really cool showcase that open protocols really do really make Bitcoin borderless.

Finally, we did a new release 2.3.1 which adds support for only showing NWC connectors (for apps like Zapple Pay and ZapPlanner which only support the NWC protocol), fixing a display bug with the Lnbits connector icon and also a UX improvement to only request the balance if the button/modal is actually visible (and connected) so that users do not get unexpected and annoying WebLN confirmation popups (requested by hzrd149 from Nostrudel, which seems to now be many user's favorite desktop Nostr client!).

We're not sure about the filters idea because originally Bitcoin Connect was created to simply expose a WebLN provider no matter which wallet you choose to connect to. I sought feedback from Bumi and Rene, and we need to review what it means to add filters and whether or not we want to expose NWC from Bitcoin Connect, and the complexity this will bring. I believe Nostr could be just as important as Bitcoin, and NWC enables for the first time an open protocol for natively connecting to any type of node or wallet in a very simple way.

Until next time,
Roland