Pull payments paid out to bolt11 invoices #5472
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The custom exchange rate for pull payments can also be used to offer payments to merchants that traditionally have not requested payment in bitcoin. So if I am selling an item for 5 CAD and want 5 CAD, I will have to charge you sats at the rate at which Bull Bitcoin is buying bitcoin (bid price). But if I owe you 5 USD but have CAD, I will be charged the conversion rate which Visa demands plus maybe a fee. 5 USD might be 6.85 CAD at mid-market rates, but on my credit card statement, I might get charged 6.95 CAD. And you might only get 4.50 USD after paypal takes their fee. I could offer you however many sats I could buy for 6.85 and that would be cheaper than paying through a credit card. And you could probably get more than 4.50 USD for those sats. So what I could do is offer you a withdraw link for 6.85 CAD at my custom rate and send you the link. This is like putting cash in front of a person to settle the debt: you ask the person if they want the money, and if they take it you can consider the debt settled. If they refuse it, you can fall back and pay them over PayPal. The reason this is important is that if you ask someone if they accept bitcoin, they will often say that they don't. But if you ask them if they accept bitcoin at the same time as you give them an offer that they can immediately take to withdraw funds, they might start researching to look into if they can somehow get more of their own currency by taking you up on your offer instead of using paypal. |
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I think pull payments can currently only be sent onchain or to a lightning addresses (and possibly LNURL addresses).Update: you can pay out to bolt11 invoices. The LNBC1 destination that gave me the error message in the screenshot is from scanning a wallet of satoshi QR code.
It might have come up before, but it would be nice if it was possible to send directly to a bolt11 invoice. If the payment to the bolt11 invoice fails, the user might have to enter a new one.
Other ideas for pull payments:
show the current exchange rate that the payment would execute at.
allow the exchange rate for the pull payment to use a different rate or spread. If you are refunding $1 and have to buy $1 at the time that the pull payment happens, you want to use the ask price from the rates provider instead of the bid price.
allow the user to change the denomination to sats, in effect allowing them to use the pull payment as a custodial lightning wallet until all funds have been spent
allow a user to open a lightning channel to their node as part of the pull payment.
Either where the full payment is pushed to the side of the recipient so that they receive no inbound liquidity
or where the recipient can choose if they want to buy some inbound liquidity as part of the transaction. Payout 98% but get an extra 10% in channel size or payout 95% and get an extra 25% in channel size
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