Pay for subscription via Crypto?

Hey guys. Curious if there has been any sort of development on paying for a subscription via cryptocurrency? Will it ever be an option in the official subscriptions plugin, or is it something that will need to be custom made?

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I want to integrate discourse with monero. But at the moment I am still working on other stuff. Maybe we can talk via PM about your exact use case. Which cryptocurrency are you interested in?

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I will PM you some more information.

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This comes up every now and again. The path to Official is that a few big customers, many small customers, or very many self-hosters are using it. This seems improbable in the near term.

It took a talented developer several months to get an already-working subscriptions plugin into shape, so it’s a pretty big job. But you might be able to scope things back a bit.

I’d be somewhat interested to hear more about what you want to do.

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Hey! Anything followed from this?

anything up for the maintime?

I created a gitcoin grant to work on Login with Ethereum and other things:

If you are interested in this kind of functionality please contribute.

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You can use btcpay. No web3, NFTs or Metamask (JP Morgan) are needed.

Fully open-source.

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So we depend on Bitcoin which is developed by Blockstream (Mastercard) instead.
In the end it is a tradeoff that people need to decide by themselves. I think privacy respecting and more decentralized solutions like Monero are best. It is not good to depend too much on one company or source of funding.
btcpay also seems a bit bloated and hard to host. I looked at it before but it seemed like it might not be a good idea to bundle it as a plugin.
I started work on an integration with the monero-wallet-rpc. it seems more realistic to get something working based on that, but some of the underlying infrastructure needs to improve first before I can move ahead with this.
If you have more experience with the btcpayserver let me know.
I also read the source code of the joule lightning wallet so I am roughly familiar with lightning and its UX.
Do you have to run your own lightning node to accept lightning payments via btcpayserver?

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But is more reliable than accepting Monero and die with underground. There are a plenty of things to do with Golang and LN and that could be more funny that go with the NFT hype.

I will support something related if someone start to work on that, not NFTs but best luck with that :slight_smile:

In BTCPay you host your server or pay for it, like here on Discourse.

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the thing I am working on has nothing to do with NFTs, I dont know where you got that from. :slight_smile:

I have a project that takes the “membership card” use case that some people turn to NFTs for and simplify it so it works with normal transactions.

The goal is to turn discourse into the backend for this.

I just picked Monero because it is the right tool for the job. If you know more about this please teach me, but as I understand it if you want to properly accept lightning payments you will have to host a lightning node and that is too resource intensive.
For sure you can go with a hosted service, but at this point you can also just use the stripe integration and be done with it, because in this case it will be centralized anyway.
I can understand you are emotionally attached to your coin and you want to see it being used. If you have suggestions on how to implement it and provide a UX that is better than stripe for users and admins I am open to it.

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I don’t know how much time did you have on crypto but there are 3 big groups around there:

  • Bitcoiners that use Bitcoin as their base money. They want to use LN because that is the most cheap and secure way to send money over the world,
  • Moneroides (?) that value their privacy and put their savings on XMR, hoping that market start to value the importance of privacy. At the moment only 10% of BTC transactions are made in XMR (without counting LN).
  • Shitcoiners: usually kids or gamblers that need something for spend their time like JPGs on Blockchain or some kind of wallet that enable the worst reliable networks on the world (just take a look about ERC20 or BEP20 scams, the rest are technically pump&dumps: SOL, MATIC, TRX, etc).

You can choose where put your work. There are almost nothing with good UI on LN, if you are looking for that, better you stick with Stripe :slightly_smiling_face:

I got into crypto in 2013

most Bitcoiners are stingy people that just want to use it as gold and not as money. They dont really care about spending it and therefore the UX of using bitcoin as money is bad.
It is hard to get them to spend their money, So why bother trying to implement btc and LN as a payment processor? It has a bad developer experience, a bad user experience and there is not much to gain from it.

at least something is happening in Ethereum. There are innovations happening in UX there and there is a creative, positive vibe in the community. Meanwhile in Bitcoin people just “debunk scams” all day and nothing gets done. Still lots of things need to be improved.
That being said: I still keep an open mind. Maybe there is a way to build something useful with LN. Please let me know if you have an idea.

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Thanks for your feedback, I like Monero too but it’s not usual on people now, so LN have better risk/reward when investing time on crypto payment processor.

The same you talks apply to core on Discourse. They just keep principles and fundamentals from the first day, that make the reliability and consistency that Ethereum or some crappy forum system don’t.

The bridge from on-chain to LN needs to be created or polished in backend but the experience for users (a lot of people forget that’s the base of commercial business) is really good. Take a look to Muun.

I’m not a dev but I’m looking for a partner that can follow orders without being an asshole. It’s not easy when developing is kinda overrated.