Oddbean

With the disappearance of Wallet of Satoshi for US markets, now it's more important than ever to become an "Uncle Jim" for your close friends and family members. What is an Uncle Jim? Simply put, he's a person that lends a helping hand to those in need, providing a service for them, one that they cannot provide for themselves. You can fairly easily do this if you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty by digging through the technical trenches. You'll need to run a full Bitcoin node, a Lightning node, LNBits, and Nginx. You'll also need to buy a domain name use a service such as Cloudflare, You'll setup a Bitcoin and Lightning node as you normally would. Then, you'll need to setup LNBits and configure the LNURLp and LNDHub plugins for each wallet that you're going to host. The hardest part of this whole setup is the local networking portion of this. You'll need to have a server or a dedicated machine to run Nginx. This is a web server. You'll need to setup this web server to act as a reverse proxy to point to your LNBits installation. In this example, you'll setup your Nginx configuration to use wallet.mydomain.com and do a reverse proxy to your LNBits installation and port number. Then, to finalize the local networking, you'll configure your router to do port forwarding to your Nginx installation. For example: Router Port Forwarding 443 -> Nginx 443 -> LNBits 5000 Then, you'll need to create a free account on Cloudflare and point your domain that you registered to Cloudflare. You'll then need to add your home IP address and a subdomain. Maybe you'll use wallet.mydomain.com. If all goes as planned, you should be able to connect to https://wallet.mydomain.com and view your LNBits. You now have a Zappable Lighting address user@wallet.mydomain.com. This isn't the best guide. I wrote this very quickly after reading a Bitcoin Magazine article about being an Uncle Jim. Hopefully this gives you enough information to ask the right questions or perform some advanced Google searches. Good luck!

You can simplify a lot of this using wireguard between the server and your full node. You can host lnbits on the server and point it at your node via the wg ip. No port opening, no home IP address needed.

I use Cjdns, which does not require reconfiguring when IPs change. The Cjdns IP6 is permanent and cryptoauthenticated (as well as e2e) like a nostr address. Throughput is higher with wg, openvpn, and other pt2pt vpns, and yggdrasil provides a high throughput mesh vpn like cjdns (but with higher latency).

https://www.austrich.net/self-custodial-zaps-with-nostdress/ This article helped me alot in the time a had my own lightning node. Will setup a new one in the near future. Using this document again at that point of time.

I'm not sure of the situation in the US, but where I'm at, most of our routers come with a built in integration for dynamic DNS providers, sych as dynDNS. You'll probably still need to set up a DMZ, or routing rules, to ensure inbound connections reach the right location within your local network, but it would offset the need to pay for and manage a top level domain. https://account.dyn.com/

Agreed. I am inviting my friends to use my node to get started. It is still custodial, but at least they know which door to knock (number to call) should they have a question or a problem. On top of lightning, we need a multiplier of 1000x or so to give everybody a chance to participate. Until someone figures out how to onboard the fraction of the world population who chooses self-custody, let's try to uncle jimming it.