sms4sats introduction

sms4sats.com launched over a year ago, see the announcement tweet: https://twitter.com/citlayik/status/1420777809299927042

First a quick description of what we currently offer:

• Most online services require a phone number to ensure their users are authentic and not bots because there's a cost to owning and operating a phone number.

• Online services can sometimes mistakenly leak or willingly sell these phone numbers to bad actors or advertisers.

• sms4sats.com offers 1-time use disposable phone numbers so anyone can pay some sats with Lightning and receive a phone number, give the phone number to the online service (twitter, telegram, discord etc) and as soon as SMS is received, it'll be shown to the user which then can enter it into the verification screen of the service.

The beauty of this idea was that it was fast and accountless. Thanks to Lightning, we are able to complete all of this experience within 45 seconds, no need to login, no need to keep custodial funds on the service.

Hold Invoices: One big issue we had was regarding refunds, sometimes the auth codes didn't arrive: maybe the service was not able to send it or maybe they didn't work. We had to manually check orders and refund users manually. This was not sustainable as a very small operation. So we started using "hold invoices" and we only settle them once a verification code is successfully relayed to the end user. Note that here, there's still trust involved such that our backend knows the preimage to finalize the payment. So in our case, it wasn't about removing trust but just improving the user experience and avoid having them manually request a refund if there's some issue with the number.

Telegram Bot: Although for manual refunds we also released a sms4sats telegram bot that can handle preimages, preimaghashes and order ids to check and automatically refund you directly to your lntxbot account!

Android App: Another issue we faced was the SMS delivery dependability issue, we work with a multitude of bulk phone number providers who source their numbers from other providers. So it's just phone numbers and phone farms all the way down. Unfortunately this causes some quality issues, we can't always make sure phone number is not banned or that it can receive the code in a timely manner. To resolve this issue we have launched a very new alpha quality android app that allows anyone to buy a simcard and earn Bitcoin for automatically relaying SMS messages. You can find more info in this post, we are hoping to improve this slowly so both bitcoiners can earn and SMS requesters have a higher quality source of phone numbers.

So far we talked about the past and consumer facing side of sms4sats. Next step is what we think is the B2B aspect of sms4sats.com and the next chapter in its growth. We decided to build this part in public as part of the Legends of Lightning hackathon: a Programmable SMS API similar to twilio where Lightning companies can send 2FA SMS codes to their users and pay directly with Lightning!