Add value-4-value support with Bitcoin Lightning payments (boosts, boostagrams, and streaming sats)

[aChrisYouKnow]

The ability to send messages with Boots would be fantastic. Currently when I want to send a boost message, I leave Podverse, open another Podcasting 2.0 compatible podcast player, navigate to the same time position so the boost has the correct timestamp, and send the message there. It would be great to do this all within Podverse.

I assume this is on the roadmap, but I didn't see an existing feature request so I figured I'd add one to get it on the list.

Thanks!

[mitchdowney]

Thanks @Chris869218, we are super excited to add Boostagrams, but we're waiting for Podcast Index's "wallets and stats" service to go online before we continue developing V4V features. We're hoping sometime early 2022 🤞

[mitchdowney]

@Chris869218 update on this issue...the Podcast Index "wallets and stats" service was scrapped early this year, so that never became an option for us 🙁

The ONLY blocker to adding boosts and boostagrams to mobile for us is that we are waiting for a Bitcoin Lightning service to exist that will not require us to be the custodian of wallets. My understanding is apps today are relying on LNPay, which is a B2B service, and if we signed up with that, we would have master key access to everyones wallet on our service. We don't want that type of responsibility, so instead we are waiting for a Bitcoin Lightning service that doesn't require us to be wallet custodians.

Most of the V4V/boost code was actually already completed in Podverse about a year ago, but we never published it outside of Beta because it relied on LNPay. So, once a service exists we can integrate with, we should be able to deliver the feature quickly.

In the mean-time, we recently added boostagrams to the Podverse website, and it is compatible with the Alby browser extension. You can check out a video demo of it here.

[genebean]

This is in the app now :)

[xrishox]

is it in the fdroid version too?

[mitchdowney]

@xrishox it should be in the F-Droid v4.6.3 version. Please let us know if it's not appearing for you.

The one part that's missing, however, is streaming sats. We have a separate ticket for that feature though, so I'll go ahead and close this issue.

https://github.com/podverse/podverse-rn/issues/1176