This proposal expires soon: please consider supporting my new one (222):

Support Proposal 222 on PeakD
Support Proposal 222 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 222 on Ecency

First of all I used to say I'm not a real developer but I'm changing my stance on that. I once was a proper management consultant, with a side order of project management thrown in, and I did work on large software projects. But I never really worked collaboratively on code.

Which is all an introduction to say that my approach to developing for Hive these past few month started a little less rigorous than it could have been. This all still feels like fun, but with the funds I'm receiving from the DHF, I'm taking it a whole lot more seriously.

2 Million Sats Served!

The next thing to say is that since I turned on the Hive/HBD -> Sats gateway the system has paid over 2,000,000 Sats of lightning invoices! And most of that wasn't just me testing it!

You access this primarily on lnd.v4v.app where you paste a lightning invoice. This process also works with any direct message on Hive to @v4vapp sent by any interface containing a Lightning invoice. More details here.

This is the raw diagnostics I've received from my back end:

  {
    "hive_from": "_total",
    "count": 344,
    "count_success": 167,
    "net_hive": 961.8962265226775,
    "total_sats": 2078751,
    "hours": 6720
  }

Back end tools

Which comes to the first point to do with me being on my own. There's a whole level of back end development and accounting which needs to be improved here. This is turning out to be real money and whilst I'm not losing money, I need a whole lot more dedicated reporting to really track the way this thing works.

This is even more important because the long term goal is to take what I'm running and give the software away so that it is relatively easy to set up. The goal is for there to be a decentralised list of nodes that can perform this Hive to Lighting swap, with an as yet unwritten system on Hive itself being the source of where you can swap.

Going the other way Lightning to Hive and HBD

It's always been my plan to convert Lightning payments or tips into Hive. At present I do this for relatively small payments people send while listening to podcasts on Value 4 Value enabled apps.

But if you want to convert 50,000 sats to Hive or HBD in one go, it's not so easy. I've worked on this a little myself but come to the realisation that it's too much for me to learn efficiently. To that end I got a quote for a suitable system, to be written entirely for open source distribution.

Quote for Lightning to Hive payment gateway

This mini site (a partner site for lnd.v4v.app) will show a QR code, allow you to enter a Hive account name and when you pay the lightning invoice, probably from a phone app, the value will be received as Hive. I'm putting the quote up here for all to see, if anyone on Hive thinks they can do this work or has a comment on the rate, let me know.

At first this will be stand alone, but my idea and my goal is for this to have an API which any Hive front end can call and which will then pop up a "send lightning" button and perhaps pre-fill in the Hive address it will go to.

I'm aware of the history of the stalled out HiveTips project but for many reasons outside of Hive, I'm sure this functionality brings Hive closer to a much bigger user base than a Hive alone system can ever hope to reach.

Ideas

But also consider the attraction: Lightning to HBD on our properly distributed system with pseudonymous/anonymous accounts and interest on savings. That's a huge deal.

Do we want to charge $3 for a Hive account or more to get an account with a bit of HP to start off? Lightning is an up and coming easy on ramp and this will be the mechanism for all of Hive to accept that.

I know we have tips on Hive, which aren't used a great deal, but this gives a much wider functionality: no account is needed for this. Any Hive user will be able to receive Lightning payments without doing anything and Lightning, partly because of Twitter, Jack Dorsey and Strike in the USA and El Salvador, is fast becoming entrenched for this kind of thing.

I'm full aware that Lightning isn't Bitcoin or even a blockchain system. But for fast, cheap, anonymous small payments it does have a lot going for it. Especially for sending: receiving is easy harder, which is why Hive, where receiving funds is so easy, is such a good match for Lightning.

I know that @threespeak are very keen for this to be built and to add to their front end. I'm hoping it will be so easy to use from a dev and user point of view, that bringing this in is a no brainer which is why I'm going to commission this dev work early in January.

V4V Streaming Sats to Podcasts

This system works. It's pretty darn amazing and I'm really happy with the way in which I've got it working and kept it running.

It isn't getting a large usage yet and that is partly my fault and party a choice. The whole eco-system is very young and I haven't pushed it as hard as I could but that will change in the next few months.

  {
    "hive_accname": "_total",
    "count": 815,
    "total_sats_sent": 138860,
    "total_USD": 66.11402319999996
  }

Personal Stuff and another Proposal

I've pulled right back from my own company here in Israel and have been concentrating almost full time on development and promotion of V4V and @podping (we're working quietly on the "going live" notification for streamers via Podping which I think will be huge).

My current funding request from the DHF expires on 9th of January. That proposal will have paid out 30,600 HBD and my previous Podping one paid out HBD 7,000. I've converted a lot of that into Hive at the time and the Podping amount is almost all staked and being used to provide the Resource Credits that keep Podping running.

I have paid a number of sub-contractors along the way (around 5000 HBD) and I'm set to spend 7000 HBD or so as detailed above on V4V early in the new year.

When I compare the hours that I've put in to this against the hourly rates for developers I hire, I know that I've worked on this at well below market rates most of the time. I am most definitely not complaining because I'm doing what I want to do and the funding and the votes from the community have been a very big part of the encouragement to keep developing new dimensions which I believe will make Hive much more valuable for all of us.

As such I'm going to put in another funding request for 255 HBD per day for another 30,600 HBD 4 months.

Beautiful art by Dame Kenny-Ben

One more thing...

I've also written a little bot which takes art for the No Agenda Podcast (which has >1m listeners per week) and posts it to Hive. I'm trying to encourage more of the artists and audience to look at Hive as a new online Home and bring more of a community here. It's just one of those things I like to do and part of my holistic vision to put Hive in prime position supporting podcasting (and yes I'm working with @aureal too)

Support Proposal 201 on PeakD
Support Proposal 201 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 201 on Ecency

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V4Vapp Updates ongoing funding proposal for the BTC Lightning to Hive bi-directional bridge