I wouldn't use it or promote it.

• email infrastructure has been on the path to centralization for years, it's a cartel now in essence
• almost everyone uses the monopolists email service

LNURL will probably end up unsupported anyway (lightning devs are coming up with a different standard), so using this protocol means supporting 2 other protocols that are on their way to obsolescence

I realize that there may not be any privacy problems depending on how it's implemented, but I'm still not interested; it's using a creaky centralized system that is otherwise on the way out

just to be clear: this has nothing to do with email! just the known format of an email address is reused, maybe my tldr was badly formulated... sorry about that. edited to make it clearer, i hope

i was yesterday listening in the bi-weekly c-lightning dev meeting and rusty explained something similar to the lightning address using bolt12. his implementation would only need to access the webserver once (to get the lightning node associated with the identifier like me@domain.com), can be proofed by a signature (if i understood it correctly) and after the first round only the lightning network itself will be used. using the lightning address proposed on the site mentioned in op, you would always request and get invoices over the webserver

i like how rusty thinks about this topic, still using the web the existence of email addresses to jumpstart and after that only relying on the lightning network itself - what do you think?

I am a little bit late on this.
I discovered this thread while updating my:
Lightning Network Observer

I would agree with ndalliard here: user experience is still difficult for most people.
Adding an option to send payments using an interface as simple as an email address (albeit the backend is quite different), would only make things easier for a lot of people.

Advanced users can still fiddle with the more privacy-oriented methods if they wish.
This is the beauty of the opt-in systems.

i run my own mailserver and my emails don't land in spam folders... are you talking from first experience? if so, maybe i can help

exactly. humans are creatures of habit. and you may not like it, but humans in general are more used to the form of an email than a random looking string. but in the end we will see if the lightning address is something that will find bigger adoption. also what fillippone said: it is opt-in, you are free not to use it. but i also like what rusty is doing with bolt12, looks similar to what the lightning address achieves, but with less dependency on the webserver (only needed once initially, for the lightning address with every transaction the webserver is needed)

I believe Google Chrome and possibly some other browsers present a dialog asking you whether you want to open links like that outside of Chrome, and since the default button is "Cancel", it deters a lot of people from opening apps outside the browser, and this includes wallets that are trying to send BTC.

Also I don't particularly recommend this approach, a vulnerability hiding within browsers might allow for maliciously modifying the program arguments before they are sent to the program.

According to the documentation, for all intents and purposes, you must be hosting your own email server in order to use this program. You cannot use popular email providers such as gmail (unless such email provider decides to offer this type of service in the future).

I don't see many email providers offering this type of service due to the increased risk of account hijackings. The majority of email services are intended for personal use, and this type of service is really for business users.

no you don't have to host your own email server to offer a lightning address. it only uses the known format of an email address, besides that, it has nothing to do with email or email hosting or email servers. you are right, that gmail doesn't offer lightning address atm

i disagree about that last part. we are basically talking about sending bitcoin, that is personal