PayMyDesk: What We Built at the Shock the Web Lightning Hackathon

Rent a spare desk, get paid in sats. A week at BOLT.FUN’s first online Lightning hackathon, and a design review from the Bitcoin Design Community.

Published on March 31, 2022

We built a thing with bitcoin. It’s the first thing I’ve ever built with bitcoin. It’s called PayMyDesk, it lets anyone rent out a spare desk for the day and get paid in sats over the Lightning Network, and it came out of a week at Shock the Web, the first hackathon from BOLT.FUN.

The PayMyDesk homepage: Rent a desk with bitcoin — paymydesk.com on demo day, Monday 28 March 2022.

The hackathon

Shock the Web ran online from Tuesday 22 to Monday 28 March 2022, open to anyone, anywhere. The first three days were talks and warm-up sprints; Friday, Saturday and Sunday were heads-down building; submissions closed on Monday afternoon, followed by presentations and results. It was organised by the Peak Shift team behind BOLT.FUN and supported by Bitcoin Design, Spiral, Alby, LNbits and Galoy, with judges from Breez, ZEBEDEE, Synonym, Alby, LNbits and Galoy.

On the Thursday, Christoph Ono from the Bitcoin Design Community gave an introduction to the Bitcoin Design Guide and its UI kit. That is the same Guide I’ve been studying since the start of the year. The hackathon shares a Slack with the design community, which tells you something about how seriously this corner of bitcoin takes design.

What we built

The first PayMyDesk sketch in Figma: a QR code on a desk creates a Lightning invoice when scanned — The first sketch. A QR code on the desk: scan it when you sit down, scan it when you leave, and the sats go to the right people for the hours you used.

We entered as Team Sugar, after the fintech we’re building. The first sketch was simpler still: a QR code stuck to the desk itself. It changed a bit as we built it, but the idea stayed deliberately small: the Airbnb of desk renting, paid for with bitcoin, in your local area. We aimed it at co-working spaces, but if you have a spare desk in your garage it works just as well. List the desk, add a photo, set your own day rate in sats. Someone sees it, scans a Lightning QR code with their wallet, and it’s booked.

The PayMyDesk form for listing a desk: date, city, desk name and price in sats — Listing a desk: when it is free, where it is, what to call it, and how many sats.

I’m a designer more than a developer, so most of it is no-code. LNbits handles the Lightning payments through its API. Airtable holds the desks and the bookings. Zapier joins them together and publishes each new desk as a post on a Ghost site. The one trick I’m pleased with: when a payment succeeds, the wallet opens a short form with the payment reference tucked into a hidden field, so the booking and the payment find each other without a line of backend code.

We registered paymydesk.com on the Saturday, which is either commitment or a cry for help. There’s a demo video on the BOLT.FUN channel.

A PayMyDesk booking page for Satoshi’s, Desk 002, showing an LNbits LNURL-pay QR code — Booking Desk 002 at “Satoshi’s”, an imaginary Belfast co-working space. Scan the LNURL code with a Lightning wallet and the desk is yours for the day.

What it taught us

Lightning is genuinely fast. A payment settles in about the time it takes to look up from your phone. After years of card payments that “complete” and then settle days later, that is a strange and lovely thing to design for.

The invoice is the interface. A Lightning invoice carries an amount, a destination and an optional message, and by default it expires after an hour. Most of the design work is in what happens around that QR code: what the person sees before they scan, what happens when it lapses, how they know it worked.

Sats make small prices make sense. Pricing a desk at ₿0.0005 is absurd. Pricing it at 50,000 sats is a number a person can hold in their head. The Guide gives units and symbols a section of their own, and it is right to.

How we did

The top three were Arion Parking from Atlanta BitDevs, who also took best design, LNbits Legend and TwentyUno. All three are worth a look. We didn’t trouble the podium. But on Tuesday evening the Bitcoin Design Community made PayMyDesk the subject of its “Learning Bitcoin and Design” call, alongside LNbits, and spent a good part of the hour pulling it apart in the friendliest possible way. The recording is on their channel.

An open design review, in public, from people who design wallets for a living, two days after the build sprint ended. You do not get that from many communities.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.