How to Copy Michael Saylor and Create Your Own Bitcoin Lightning Email Address

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Employees of enterprise software company MicroStrategy can now receive bitcoin payments to their corporate email addresses, MicroStrategy co-founder and executive chairman Michael Saylor revealed on Twitter Cafe Bitcoin Spaces on Monday.

It may seem like a magical feat, but anyone can create one. We’ll show you how.

The Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s faster and more scalable cousin, solves Bitcoin’s scalability issues. Traditionally, when someone wants to receive a Lightning payment, they generate a Lightning invoice, a long string of scrambled characters that is not human readable.

To counter this, the Lightning Address standard is spreading across the industry, replacing the long, ugly invoice with what looks like a familiar email address.

As noted on The Lightning Address website, a number of industry Lightning services offer a way to easily configure one of these addresses, such as Zebedee, Alby, and Breez. Each service has its own unique domain, take your pick.

We will be using Bitcoin gaming app Zebedee, one of the most vocal proponents of the Lightning address.

When you install Zebedee on your phone, it immediately asks you to create a “gamertag”, which is simply a Lightning address under another name.

Select a “gamertag” on Zebedee. Image: Zebedee

Select a name and voila! You have created a Lightning address. It’s that simple.

It is important to note that since the Lightning industry is still booming, the Lightning address cannot be used everywhere. The Lightning Address website offers a list of Lightning wallets and services that support sending or receiving payments with a Lightning address.

If you want to get really fancy, it’s also possible to add Lightning support to your own personal domain, like Saylor did with MicroStrategy.com. (Note that you must own the domain to be able to do this. This won’t work for a gmail.com email, for example.)

Setup is also fairly straightforward, as long as you have the ability to upload files to your website’s server. The Chrome Lightning extension, Alby, recently walked through the how-to steps on Twitter.

First, install the Alby browser extension, available on Chrome and Firefox, and set up an account with Alby. At the bottom of the account creation page, you will create a new Lightning address with them.

Creation of an Alby account. Image: Alby

After that go here: https://getalby.com/.well-known/lnurlp/. For example, my username is alyssa so I went to https://getalby.com/.well-known/lnurlp/alyssa

If all goes well, your page will look like this:

Uploading your user file to Alby. Image: Alby

You then download the file locally so that you can use it in the next step by clicking Save in the upper left corner. Delete .json at the end, so the filename is just your username.

When this is set, upload this file to the same location on your own website server: for example, if your domain is http://bitcoinrulez.com, you will want to upload the file to https://bitcoinrulez.com/ .well known /lnurlp/

And that’s all! You can now try sending a Lightning payment to an email from this domain and see if it works. If you followed the steps correctly, you can now ask people to send sats directly to your email address, just like Michael Saylor.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment or other advice.

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