SECOND IS NOW ON MAINNET. Bark, our implementation of the Ark protocol, is available for anyone to start making bitcoin payments. Included in the launch are our mainnet Ark server, the Bark SDK, and multiple wallets to try from day one.

Bitcoin payments integrations has become so much easier as compared to what it was like 5 years ago. And it's going to become the default payments method in all apps very soon.

Got this set up on payjoin.org/donate yesterday. Took just a few minutes. This is exactly what we needed to accept lightning before managing our own node. Easy.

This is super cool, honestly! Probably the easiest way to run a self-hosted version of @BtcpayServer and avoid relying on someone else's instance!

Building mining payouts in rust (bonus chapter) by @LukasHozda @ocean_mining

C'est sûrement la meilleure option pour les commerçants : un BTCPay capable d'encaisser sur Lightning (et Ark) sans toute la complexité liée à la mise en place et à la gestion d'un nœud Lightning.

Great to see this live! I really enjoyed contributing 🤘 Important infrastructure for merchants that do not want to maintain Lightning liquidity.

This is an awesome service which makes accepting lightning very simple without giving up custody.

I can testify: Bark's plugin in BTCPayServer makes accepting Bitcoin a 5 yo game The setup takes a few minutes and has almost no fee ⚡️ (PS: No, they didn't pay me for this tweet, I am just a happy user)

Bark plugin for BTCPay Server is out! Start accepting Lightning and onchain payments today, right away in your BTCPay instance. Could be a payment POS machine, or fully online shop.

The Bark @BtcpayServer plugin is ready for primetime and already powering our new Second merch store (where there's some pretty cool products in there if I do say so myself).

Thanks @start9labs and @_MattHill_ 🙏

I remember the original Eligius pool had a high payout threshold that could take many weeks to meet. Which makes sense since you want to limit the onchain fees that eat into your mining rewards. Imagine if you could receive offchain bitcoin much more frequently with ~no fees. Ark payouts basically unlock an entire new class of lower power mining hardware that can generate actual payouts now. It makes those clever water heater style setups or Bitaxe microminer thingies more feasible. Plus a VTXO grants you access to Lightning if you want to spend your mined sats. It's just overall a great fit for mining pools.

Inspired by Matthew here, I tasked Claude with building a demo/benchmark of a mining pool payout processor using bark. Here's a simulated mining pool payout, 21 outputs of which are direct onchain payments to miners, one is change, and one is a board output that funded another 200 payouts using ark payments: mempool.space/signet/tx/b49b… Taking it up a notch I decided to run a larger-scale demo where I pay over 2,288 miners using ark payments. Funding this required multiple board outputs (vouts 21 and 22): mempool.space/signet/tx/d57e… The beauty of this is that it gives mining pools full control over their payout fee structure. They calculate how much to board to cover every payout, pay the onchain fee for the board at a fee rate they choose, then upon confirmation they make free, instant ark payments to each miner. No worrying about max routing fees on Lightning, no worrying about inbound fees along the route, no worrying about whether a miner's wallet is online to receive or is even reachable by the pool. Even more interesting is that pools don't need to maintain a reserve balance on any ark server. They can include a separate board output for each unique ark server they pay out to. Every ark address contains its server's ID, so parsing the payout addresses is enough to work out how much to board to each server to ensure the mining pool doesn't make a mistake. What if the mining pool has problems making a payment after boarding the ark? Board outputs require one onchain transaction to be broadcast to unilaterally exit and one transaction to claim the newly-broadcast UTXO.

Ark-enabled mining pools would help the home miner out a ton. Imagine having a monthly power bill to pay but the bitcoin you mined being unable to go towards it because you're stuck below the payout threshold.