How to send a payment from LND

Now you have an open channel. Let's put it to work and send a small payment from your node. Let's donate $1 in BTC to the Human Rights Foundation!

1. Go to HRF's Bitcoin donation page.
2. Under "BTC Pay Server", move the slider to your donation amount (or type it in the box above it).

Pick an amount with the slider

3. Click the "Pay with BTCPay" button under it.

Click 'Pay with BTCPay'

4. On the checkout screen, choose "Lightning" as the payment method.
5. Use the "Copy" button to copy the invoice text to your clipboard.

On the checkout screen, choose 'Lightning', then 'Copy'

6. To pay an invoice with lncli, construct a command like this... but after --pay_req, paste the invoice text you just copied:

lncli payinvoice --pay_req [invoice text goes here]

(Curious what's inside that long invoice string? See How to decode a Lightning invoice. And if you ever want to pay an invoice from a mobile or web wallet instead of lncli, see Pay a Lightning invoice.)

7. The payment should send, and if you return to the invoice page, you should see a confirmation like this:

HRF Payment Confirmation

And how do I receive?

To receive, run lncli addinvoice --amt 1000 (the amount is in satoshis) and hand the payment_request string from the output to the payer. If you want a website or app to do this automatically -- with a hosted checkout, no invoice copy-pasting, and no API keys -- see OpenReceive.