Two weeks ago, Corné Plooy published a draft for a promising protocol improvement to Bolt-11 called Bolt-12: Payment Protocol For Lightning.

I was thinking of how to use Lightning for various types of payments, and I think it’s currently fine for customer/(web)shop type interactions, but it seems a bit inconvenient for other use cases, e.g. salary payments or direct pay-out of cryptocurrency bought on an exchange. I came up with an idea that addresses some of these issues and more (e.g. payee anonymity) by having a direct line of communication between payer and payee instead of BOLT11-style interaction