Greeting, this in Enzo from LNCal, a lightning enabled calendar which you can share with your clients and where they can book your time by paying you directly in Bitcoin.
Ask me anything.
is there a discovery page of who is on it and what they are offering with their time?
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I was thinking of adding a Leaderboard. might be nice! We don't categorize users though, so it would be hard to know what they're offering from a condensed view
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First of all, congrats, LNCal is a great idea.
My question is about integrations. Do you plan to add more integrations other than google calendar?
I ask this because for those of us that don't use Google products, LNCal loses a big part of the appeal if we are not able to integrate it in our workflows.
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thanks for your feedback. what sort of integration are you referring to? Other calendars like Proton Calendar?
Out next integration might be Zoom or Teams so that virtual calls are generated on the fly and not manually.
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Yes, other calendar proprietary services (such as Proton Calendar, Zoho Calendar, Outlook Calendar) and self hosted tools (such as NextCloud).
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yes we'll probably add those one by one
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what lightning products do you wish someone would build?
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I'd like to see more apps that give the opportunity to people to earn Bitcoin. That's the main reason I started LNCal. It's very important to create use cases for people to interact with Bitcoin in a simple KYC free manner.
I'd also like to see more low level products that help devs integrate Lightning more easily with web apps!
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What motivated you to lncal?
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I wanted to learn more about Lightning and just reading books and articles didn't cut it. Before I knew about Alby I wanted to create something similar to Metamask (in browser wallet) for lightning but that was taken :). Then eventually the idea of a public calendar + lightning for people to book your time hit me and I have never been more focused on a product since then.
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wen CalDAV?
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haha second time I hear about this. I might need to start paying attention. tbh that would mean spinning up new infrastructure and maintaining it. I need to make sure there is enough demand before committing to it, but I am aware of it. thanks :)
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Understood. Probably there are a lot of noobs who are happy to share all their data with google.
We should provide options for sovereign plebs though, who prefer to self-host..
That said, it's not easy, cheap, or quick, to build / test / document all this stuff. Especially without investment or revenues.
Good luck with it!!
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yes the google calendar integration satisfies 90% of the user base. Unfortunately, as you say the privacy trade off with Google is alarming! We'll also look into potential integrations with Proton Calendar if enough users demand it!
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+1 on CalDAV. Works well with protonmail. I don't necessarily want to share my personal calendar with you but I'd like to be able to import lncal into my existing calendar software.
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I guess CalDav could work both ways. But ideally LnCal would sync (read) from my personal calendar to avoid double bookings.
The main thing about CalDav is that it is an open standard used by many open source (self-hostable) calendar services.
No need for any of that google / microsoft sh1t.
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Trusted by over 4 very famous bitcoiners 🤣
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Well done, good work.
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thank you!
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What were the hardest technical difficulties to overcome in developing a lightning/btc application compared to conventional web 1/2 apps?
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Figuring out how to talk to a lightning node and creating a package for LNURL-Auth was challenging, but to be honest I love it. Much better than integrating with Stripe where you need to spend weeks figuring out their rule for accepting money in different countries. The feeling you have of owning the money with no intermediaries is worth all the effort in the world!
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any tutorials to get started please....
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I don't know of any tutorials unfortunately. I used my lightning node + Polar (https://lightningpolar.com/) and started tinkering. If you already know how to build apps and web app, the easiest way would be to use a wrapped node like BTCPay Server or LNBits, and start talking to their APIs to create/receive transactions. That would probably be much easier to start.
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what are the biggest lncal use cases today? do you have much visibility into the industries that lncal users are from?
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so far it's mostly people related to the bitcoin ecosystem and some from the wider crypto. it's mostly people that are known in the bitcoin twitter sphere with some outlier more focused on consultancy. This is a function of how widespread Bitcoin Lightning and LNCal are of course. The more Bitcoiners demand being paid in Bitcoin the more different industries we'll see joining in these apps.
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interesting, what do you think will be the first big non-bitcoin related industry for lncal?
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I would love to see it used in more traditional brick&mortar businesses as a booking system where they could change a small fee to get some compensations for no-shows or manage fully their bookings.
Essentially any service business could use LNCal as a booking system. Seeing the big growth of business that accept bitcoin on https://btcmap.org/ makes me kinda positive about this.
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What's the most surprising thing you've learned building lncal?
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On a positive note: how forgiving and inclusive the bitcoin ecosystem is. People push you, root for you and want you to succeed.
On negative note: it's still early day for the LN, and specifically all the features and functionalities for integrating it with the Web are basically missing. LNURL helped a lot to get this (and many others) projects started.
The integration for the web/mobile should be priority in my mind if we want this to succeed.
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