Logging In With Nothing but a Lightning Wallet
What Lightning login is, why you do not need any bitcoin to use it, and how to sign into every txid.uk site in about thirty seconds with Wallet of Satoshi.
Every txid.uk site supports Lightning login. If you already use one of them with a wallet, you are automatically signed in across the rest. If you have never tried it, the whole process takes about thirty seconds.
This article explains what Lightning login is, why you do not need to own any bitcoin to use it, and exactly how to log in from the profile widget in the sidebar of this site.
How to log in
- Install Wallet of Satoshi from the App Store or Google Play. It is free and works on any phone.
- Open the wallet. You do not need to add money. An empty wallet is perfectly fine.
- On this site, open the profile widget in the left sidebar and tap the Login button. A QR code appears in a modal.
- In Wallet of Satoshi, tap Scan, point the camera at the QR code, and approve.
That is it. You are logged in. The wallet remembers you, so next time it is just a single tap from the same device.
Why it works without any bitcoin
Lightning login is not a payment. It is a signature.
Your wallet holds a private key. Signing a short message with that key proves the key belongs to you, in the same way a handwritten signature proves a letter is from you. The site only ever sees a public key, which acts like a username that nobody else can fake. No balance is read, no transaction is made, and no money moves.
This is why you do not need to buy or hold any bitcoin. You can keep the wallet empty forever and it will still log you in. You can also delete the wallet tomorrow, install a new one, restore from the same seed phrase, and your account here comes back with it.
The standard behind this is called LNURL-auth. It is open, it is supported by most modern Lightning wallets, and it was designed specifically so that websites can authenticate users without asking for any personal information.
What you do not need
- No email address
- No password
- No phone number
- No KYC or identity verification
- No bitcoin balance
- No personal information of any kind
The only thing attached to your account is your Lightning public key. If that sounds minimal, it is supposed to be.
One identity across every txid.uk site
The same login works on every site under txid.uk. Log in once on learn.txid.uk, and you are also logged in on the community board, the news blog, the glossary, the apps directory, and every other subdomain. There is no separate signup for each place, no password to forget, and nothing to migrate when you switch devices.
Your progress, your comments, your upvotes, and your XP all follow the same Lightning pubkey. If you lose your phone, restoring Wallet of Satoshi from the seed phrase brings the account back with it on the new device.
Why I built it this way
Email logins get phished. Passwords get reused. Signup forms collect more data than anyone should hand out. Lightning login sidesteps all three without asking anyone to learn anything new, because the wallet does the hard part.
Bitcoin was designed from the start as a peer-to-peer system with no gatekeepers. A login system built on the same primitives fits the rest of what this site teaches. You own your keys, and your keys are enough.
Try it now
Open the profile widget in the sidebar on the left. Tap the Login button. Scan the QR with Wallet of Satoshi. Approve. You are done, and you are signed in to every txid.uk site at the same time.