How to Copy Michael Saylor and Create Your Own Bitcoin Lightning Email Address
Employees of the business software company MicroStrategy can now receive Bitcoin payments to corporate email addresses, MicroStrategy co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor revealed below Cafe Bitcoin Twitter Spaces on Monday.
It might sound like a magical feat, but anyone can set one up. We show you how.
The Lightning network, Bitcoin’s faster and more scalable cousin, fixes Bitcoin’s scalability issues. Traditionally, when someone wants to receive a Lightning payment, they generate a Lightning invoice—a long encrypted string of characters that is not readable by humans.
To counteract this, The lightning address standard is spreading across the industry, replacing the long, ugly invoice with something that looks like a familiar email address.
As shown on The Lightning Address website, a number of Lightning services across the industry offer a way to easily set up one of these addresses, such as Zebedee, Alby and Breez. Each service has its own unique domain—Select.
We will be using the Bitcoin gaming app Zebedee, one of the more vocal proponents of the Lightning address.
When you install Zebedee on your phone, you’ll be prompted to create a “gamertag,” which is simply a Lightning address with a different name.
Choose a “gamertag” on Zebedee. Image: Zebedee
Choose a name and—voilà! You have created a Lightning address. It’s as simple as that.
It is important to note that since the Lightning industry is still flourishing, the Lightning address cannot be used everywhere. The Lightning Address website has a list of Lightning wallets and services that support sending or receiving payments with a Lightning address.
If you want to get really fancy, it’s also possible to add Lightning support to your own personal domain, like Saylor did with MicroStrategy.com. (Note that you must own the domain to be able to do this. It will not work for one gmail.com e-mail, for example.)
Setting this up is also quite easy, as long as you have the ability to upload files to the site’s server. Lightning chrome extension Alby recently went through the steps on how to do it on Twitter.
First, install the Alby browser extension, available on Chrome and Firefox, and set up an account with Alby. At the bottom of the account creation page, create a new Lightning address with them.
Create an Alby account. Photo: Alby
After that, go here: https://getalby.com/.well-known/lnurlp/
If all is well, your page will look something like this:
Downloading your user file on Alby. Photo: Alby
You then download the file locally so you can use it in the next step by clicking “save” in the top left corner. Delete the “.json” at the end so the filename is just your username.
Once specified, upload this file to the same location on your own website server: For example, if your domain is http://bitcoinrulez.comthen you want to upload the file to https://bitcoinrulez.com/.well-known/lnurlp/
And that’s it! You can now try sending a Lightning payment to an email on that domain and see if it works. If you followed the steps correctly, you can now have people send rates straight to your email address just like Michael Saylor.
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice.
