Open source is an essential piece of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Our Bitcoin-focused team loves open-source, and we want to give back to the open-source realm. So, every other Friday, the Voltage crew spends the day working on whatever open-source projects they choose, as Voltage CEO Graham explained in an earlier blog post.
Here’s what our busy-bee crew worked on this week.
Engineer Sam and frontend engineer Adrien worked on an open-source app for the Voltage workshop that took place at the technical bitcoin conference TABconf last week in Atlanta. The workshop showed developers how to build apps with Lightning integrated. To do so, Sam and Adrien built a demo app voltage.place similar to satoshis.place, an open artboard where users can draw whatever they want (even on top of other people's drawings). They just have to pay a small Lightning payment, depending on how many pixels are drawn.
All payments made to the demo website will be donated to OpenSats, a site for donating to developers contributing to Bitcoin.
Frontend engineer Paul worked on the presentation for the workshop, walking through the creation of this app and showing users how to use Lightning, as well as how Voltage can make it easy to spin up Lightning nodes and lnbits.
Engineer Alyssa reviewed a recent PR for the bitcoin lightning watchtower The Eye of Satoshi that will make the watchtower compatible with pruned full nodes.
Engineer Alex worked on a commenter plugin for Core Lightning that he's been working on on and off. It’s a plugin for managing comments on a blog (or something similar) via a paywall using just the Core Lightning node instead of needing a separate web server.
And last but not least, UX/UI Designer Nick and frontend engineer Brandon have been working on their contribution to Legends of Lightning, a global hackathon taking place over the next month. They're planning on making a contribution to btcmap.org, a website that shows which brick-and-mortar stores around the world accept bitcoin or lightning payments. One issue with the website is that some stores that are put on the map have closed over time or no longer accept bitcoin payments, and it’s a hassle to keep records of a global map updated. Nick and Brandon’s idea is to add upvote and downvote features, a la Stacker.news, as a way to highlight whether the store still takes bitcoin/lightning payments for their services. Nick's been familiarizing himself with btcmap's design and brand to start designing this feature.
