Pay for your next massage in Bitcoin
January 31, 2022
RLAX is an innovative mobile massage service that is extremely easy to book, comfortable to use and yet affordable. We bring the best of mobile wellness straight to your door, every day of the year, in as little as an hour. And we love Bitcoin!
Pay for your next Massage with Bitcoin on chain or at warp speed via Lightning Network.
Why did we add Bitcoin Payments you’re asking?
Firstly, we are HUGE fans of Bitcoin and this is our small contribution to support the network. We believe Bitcoin will be the future of money and implemented it as an official payment method on RLAX. Because, why not? ?
Want to try it out? Head over to our website and give it a try… (Click here).
Curious how we implemented Bitcoin and Lightning? Read on.
(It will get somewhat technical from here onwards)
We are currently running our own Bitcoin Full Node – here is how we did it:
First of all, we needed a hardware computer which could support and run a bitcoin network. The requirements for hardware to run a bitcoin node are actually not that high (unlike bitcoin miners, which require high-end specifications.).
The bitcoin software can easily run on the laptop, old PC, or on a cloud service. Or alternatively, it can be installed on a raspberry pi (pronounced as raspberry pie), which is the method that we’ve chosen.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi (For illustration purposes)
Raspberry pi (not an edible pie!) is fairly easy to obtain and it can be purchased in most computer stores at a very low cost.
As a bitcoin node works better with faster disk storage, we decided to order a Solid State Drive (SSD) disk storage to pair with our raspberry pi device, this ensures that the system works smoothly without issues.
We proceeded to assemble the raspberry pi, connect it to the hard disk and the internet – et voila… our own bitcoin node is now ready for operation!
Total Cost of Hardware: Approximately 6,000-7,000 THB
This is why Bitcoin is a truly decentralised network. Everyone can run a Bitcoin Node!
Next Step: Run Bitcoin (the Software/ Protocol)
There are many popular open source Bitcoin related software developments out there that operate seamlessly with raspberry pi, such as Umbrel and MyNodeBTC and make the installation and handling of a node fairly easy.
After installing the bitcoin node software of your choice, it will begin to sync the bitcoin blockchain data (public ledger), from the first block all the way to the most recent one. The synchronisation/ downloading of the ledger takes approximately 1-4 days, depending on your internet speed.
Bitcoin Wallet
At this stage, a bitcoin wallet should be created or an existing wallet can be linked with the bitcoin node. Please ensure that the digital wallet seed phrase or private key has been stored carefully in multiple safe locations. This is extremely important for people who own a cryptocurrency wallet because if the seed phrase has been forgotten or lost, there is a huge possibility of losing all the coins owned!
*Remember: Not your keys, not your coins!
The Lightning Network
A group of brilliant minds have proposed, designed, and implemented a Layer-2 solution to increase the scalability, increase transaction rates and reduce transaction fees for the bitcoin network.
This layer-2 of the bitcoin network is called Lightning Network. It was introduced in 2015, ran on the Litecoin network in 2017, and finally on the bitcoin network in 2019. It proved to be a big boost for bitcoin payments, the transactions on the lightning network can be completed within a few seconds with transaction fees as low as a single digit satoshi! The Lightning network has been steadily growing, with over 30k+ nodes, 3.3k+ BTC network capacity, and over 10m+ users.
There are many popular bitcoin wallet applications that support the lightning networks such as BlueWallet, Breez, WalletOfSatoshi, Eclair, etc. Hence, payments completed via the lightning network can be conveniently done on the phone with just a few taps. There’s no complicated process or no need for end users to even set up their own node.
At RLAX we are now running both, our own Bitcoin Node and our own Lightning Node.
Bitcoin Payment Gateway BTCPay
The Bitcoin node is fully capable of both sending and receiving bitcoins. Likewise the Lightning node can also send, receive, and create invoices. It is, however, not efficient enough if we need to manually create, send invoices, and verify transactions. It could potentially cause hiccups in the customer booking flow experience. Thus, using a payment gateway service to serve as an intermediary to handle all these requests and transactions would be more reliable.
We’ve decided to use the BTCPay Server. It is a well-known, popular, open-source software for bitcoin payment services. The BTCPay Server is a standalone service, fully capable of managing normal point of sale (POS) services. At RLAX we seamlessly implemented BTCPay in our application to make operations and handling for our customers as smooth as possible.
Bringing all of the above-mentioned components together, we are now happy to announce that all RLAX customers can now conveniently book and pay their next home massages with bitcoin (BTC)!
Available on our website and mobile app! Fancy giving it a try?
Book now and pay your next Massage in Satoshis. ?
