Bitcoin is magic. Most people don't know that...

Captain's log block 758,828

TL:DR - The first step can be the hardest...so I'm building a thing to make it AS EASY (and fun) AS POSSIBLE to get your obstinate pre-coiner friends to buy something with bitcoin. I also hope this thing helps drive traffic to stores that accept bitcoin and is a tool they can use to get people to switch from credit cards to wonderful beautiful glorious sats.

The idea for my project started when I saw Joe Hall (@JoeNakamoto on twitter) appeal to the benevolence of the bitcoin twitter community by posting a picture of a lightning invoice and asking that someone pay for his ice cream. Sure enough some random person from very far away magically zapped some sats to the vendor.

This struck me a magical bitcoin moment that not only demonstrated the power of borderless internet native super fast freedom money but also the awesomeness of the bitcoin community. I want to take that experience and scale it so that any bitcoiner (even one without thousands of twitter followers... or even one without a twitter account at all) can orange pill their friends by replicating that magical bitcoin moment.

I have built a very rickety prototype that allows someone to purchase a voucher from my node and give it to anyone with a smartphone. All they have to do is scan the qr code and it will take them to a web app that provides them with the ability to scan a lightning invoice and either pay it immediately (my node pays it with the sats that were originally spent to buy the voucher), or post it to twitter and hope that some random bitcoiner pays it.

If it gets posted to twitter, my twitter bot will pick it up and retweet it so that any bitcoiners that follow the bot can keep tabs on it and pay invoices if they are feeling generous. If no one pays it after a certain amount of time, my node will step up and pay the invoice so that the pre-coiner isn't left hanging.

I'm still working out some kinks in the web app the twitter communication, and the web app itself needs to be styled refactored and needs a few more bells and whistles but it is getting close to an MVP. My major question though is on the legal side of things. I don't want to expose myself to some money transmitter issues or other legal pitfalls so if anyone has some expertise in that area I would love to talk. That's it for now, much more to say and much more to build!