Bitcoin giving: sats donations with receipts

Receive sats on your own identity with LNURL/zap receipts. Borderless, zero-KYC, self-sovereign giving.

Sending sats, not intermediaries

Bitcoin is the first money a computer can move and verify end-to-end without a bank in the middle. Lightning takes that further — near-instant, near-free payments, down to fractions of a cent. Together they make giving different: borderless, low-fee, and receipt-able by default.

"Sats" are the smallest unit of bitcoin (100 million per bitcoin). Sending sats to a Lightning address is as close to sending a text message as money gets — but every payment is signed and settled on a network you can verify.

What a Lightning donation looks like

1. You send sats to a Lightning address like giveabit@api.satohash.io:8443.
2. The recipient's node settles it, typically in seconds, with fees measured in fractions of a cent.
3. You get a receipt: the amount, the recipient's identity, and the fact it settled.

No bank account, no card network, no "processing fee" that mysteriously eats 3% of a donation. The money moves directly.

How Give A Bit accepts sats

Every Give A Bit project has its own Lightning receive address, and the full list is public:

curl -s 'https://giveabit.io/wallets.json' \
  | jq -r '.projects[] | "\(.id)  \(.lud16)"'

Some highlights, verified live at the time of writing:

• giveabit → giveabit@api.satohash.io:8443
• satohash → satohash@api.satohash.io:8443
• sherpacarta → sherpa@api.satohash.io:8443 — and this one also has a public on-chain address for larger gifts.

The receipts — NIP-57 zap-style verifiability

On Nostr, Lightning giving is expressed as a zap (NIP-57): a payment plus a signed note that says "this many sats, to this recipient, for this reason." The receipt is a signed, public record — not a screenshot a charity generated, but a payment you can reconcile against the network.

Why zero-KYC giving matters

Traditional donating asks you to hand over personal data to a payment processor. Lightning giving doesn't: a donation is a signed payment from a key, with no required identity disclosure to a middleman. You donate as yourself (if you choose) or as a key — the money moves either way. For people in places where bank cards or payment networks are unavailable or hostile, that is not a nicety; it is the difference between being able to give and not.

Small payments, real impact

Because fees are tiny, micro-donations become practical. A thousand people sending 2,000 sats each is a real contribution, and each one is individually receipt-able. That's a giving model that scales down to the smallest donor — and up to a global audience — without a payment company taking a cut of every kindness.

The takeaway

Bitcoin giving is giving you can verify: borderless, low-fee, zero-KYC, and settled with a receipt you can check. When the recipient is a verifiable identity and the payment is a verifiable transaction, giving stops being an act of faith and becomes a fact — with a receipt attached.

Hit a real receive endpoint

Confirm a real, live Lightning receive endpoint — hit the address's LNURL and read what it answers:

curl -s 'https://api.satohash.io:8443/.well-known/lnurlp/satohash' \
  | jq '{tag, callback, metadata}'

This is the same address in the public registry — so "can I send sats here?" is answered by the network, not by us.