BTCPay Server FAQ
This is an FAQ section for our BTCPay Server product specifically. If you don't find your question on this page, please send us an email at [email protected]
Yes. You can create a BTCPay Server account for free for 7 days. After the 7 days you can either purchase a plan or your account will expire and be deleted.
Yes, you can create multiple stores in your account. However, Voltage only provides the assisted set up for one store per account. You can create additional stores within your BTCPayServer dashboard.
Currently we only offer shared server accounts. If you would like your own server you can contact us at [email protected].
You can learn more about the product and how to use it on the project's website. You can also get support in their community chat at chat.btcpayserver.org.
To start receiving payments to your Lightning enabled BTCPay Store you need inbound channels opened to your Lightning node. See the BTCPay Server documentation or our Quick Start Merchant Guide about setting up your node for merchant use.
If you generated your Bitcoin wallet from an external application you'll need a wallet application to spend your funds. You could use the application that generated the private key to spend, or you could use another software wallet. We recommend either Electrum or Sparrow wallets. Once you install either of these wallets you can import your seed into them to spend funds.
- 1.Download Sparrow from their website and open it.
- 2.Select New wallet and name it.
- 3.Select New or Imported Software Wallet and then select Mnemonic Words and the appropriate number of words from the dropdown.
- 4.Enter the words and select Create Keystore
- 5.Done! Your transactions should start showing up in your Sparrow wallet.
If you transactions don't show up in Sparrow please read the BTCPay documentation about Gap Limits. You may need to increase your Gap Limit.
- 1.Download Electrum from their website and open it.
- 2.When selecting a server choose 'Auto connect' or choose the path to a node you trust.
- 3.Give your wallet a name and click 'Next'
- 4.Select to create a 'Standard wallet'
- 5.When selecting your Keystore, select 'I already have a seed'
- 6.Enter the 12 word seed phrase you received when creating the wallet.
- 7.Click the 'Options' button and select the 'BIP39 Seed' box and click 'Ok' then 'Next'
- 8.Leave the checkbox on 'native segwit' and click 'Next'
- 9.You can optionally add a password to your wallet if you would like. Click 'Next'
- 10.Done! Your transactions should start showing up in your Electrum wallet.
If you transactions don't show up in Electrum please read the BTCPay documentation about Gap Limits. You may need to increase your Gap Limit.
When attaching your Voltage Lightning node to your BTCPay Server store through our dashboard there's several things that happen behind the scenes in your browser. One of them is we bake a macaroon for your node that has the required permissions for BTCPay Server. You can find the necessary permissions here. This allows BTCPay Server to create invoices for your node, but does not have the ability to spend funds.
This is an API Key we generate when we create the account. This is what we use to attach your Voltage Lightning nodes to your store. You can safely remove this if you would like, however you will no longer be able to update which Voltage Lightning node is attached to your store from our dashboard. Any updates would have to be manually done by you.
The safest and most secure way to generate Bitcoin keys is on an offline computer or a hardware device that is a brand new install. However, when generating your Bitcoin wallet in our dashboard all key generation happens in your browser. Nothing touches our servers or any part of the internet. Once the keys are generated, only the Derivation Scheme and the Account Key Path are sent to us to create the BTCPay store, which can't spend funds. You can optionally backup your seed phrase by entering a password to encrypt the phrase to. When backing up a seed phrase, we encrypt the phrase to the password provided client-side then backup the encrypted data.
In summary, you give up some privacy and security in favor of convenience in our dashboard. However, we can never see your private keys. Of course, if you aren't comfortable using our dashboard you can still create your store without it and provide your own key information to BTCPay Server.
If backing up your seed phrase, always use a strong password
You always need to write down your seed phrase and password somewhere outside of Voltage. Your funds will be lost if you don't keep a copy of your seed phrase. Not even Voltage can recover them for you.