Note: this only reflects my personal work this week, visit BTC Map Blog to get consolidated monthly reports.
Event API
Events are still an experimental feature I added for fun in the Android app. The goal is to see if there’s any organic demand for it.
I personally maintain a few events in Asia, but we were recently contacted by the guy behind BitcoinWalk, who wanted to sync our databases.
The problem was, we didn’t have an event API or event-scoped admin roles. So I built the missing endpoints, and they’re now live. BitcoinWalk is already using the new API, which is why you can see dozens of new events in the BTC Map Android app.
If you’re a web or iOS developer and want to see events on your platform, pull requests are welcome.
Payment Infra
We care about privacy, but we also don’t want spam, so we’ve spent a lot of time messing with paywalls. Our apps don’t require signups, but some stuff, like anonymous comments and boosts, will cost you a few sats. We weren’t sure if users would bite, but we’ve seen a steady trickle of paid invoices.
Our old invoicing server is a total hack job though. It’s unreliable and held together by digital duct tape. My main mission in January was to finally fix this mess.
I looked at a few options and ended up setting up a new server running Bitcoin Core/Knots and LND. Our old setup used the LNBits API, which was always the weakest link. The other headache was CLN, which is a maintenance nightmare. I’m a big fan of the single‑binary approach (thanks, bitcoind), and LND gets that right.
The new server is live. I’ll probably keep the old one around as a backup. By routing all new invoices to the new box, I can finally poke at the old one without breaking everything.
Sharing Knowledge
I also wrote up my whole node setup quest in a dedicated post. I’ll probably follow up with a few more deep‑dives, but this is a solid start.