Introduction: farscapian

Hello, my name is Derek Smith and I'm a software developer living in northeast Florida. I help organize the Old City Bitcoiners meetup in the area and I wanted to create a meetup website in an attempt to directly monetize my efforts using Bitcoin and other Open Source Software rather than relying on meetup.com.

So I started writing some bash scripts that allow you to self-host Bitcoin-only websites among your home or office locations.

I call the project Sovereign Stack. You can find more at the website sovereign-stack.org. The general push of the website is to inform your IT people on how to configure their networks to host Sovereign Stack workloads. It is designed to be read and interpreted by someone at least partially knowledgeable of small-business or enterprise networking.

sovereign-stack.org also hosts the git repository of the Sovereign Stack code. The software part of the project allows a network administrator to deploy bitcoin-native websites to their own hardware using just a business or residential internet connection. Once deployed, you can operate ONE OR MORE websites on the same infrastructure. All your websites share the same lighting liquidity pool. Sovereign Stack deploys BTCPay server to provide all Lightning and payment functionality. I've created a few example websites, all of which are Lightning-only and based on value-for-value model.

The first as I mentioned is oldcity-bitcoiners.info. This is a good example on how you can monetize your Bitcoin meetup and rely less on meetup.com. (meetup.com represents a trusted third party) The second is satoshi-spirits.dev which mimics a bitcoin-only order workflow, perfect for those bars or breweries that want to have Bitcoin-native functionality. Next, of course, sovereign-stack.org itself is a website built with Sovereign Stack software--a good example of monetizing an open source project. Finally, there is my personal website farscapian.com/about which accepts tips for all the work I do proselytizing for Bitcoin, amen.

The project is still very early, and I'm trying to get more eyes on it and hopefully find other developers interested in moving the project forward. Furthermore, any financial support is always appreciated so I don't have to dip into savings.

I found out about this tournament a little late so I'm hoping Sovereign Stack is still eligible for consideration 🙏.

Derek Smith
farscapian.com