btcpuertorico on Nostr: 👀 nostr:note1ypp82qq8g87ul34dzhxxdnhaqusc4av9r4a93t3a8ywttd33g3fsd2l30s

quoting note1ypp…l30s

Double-entry accounting is a tried and true method for tracking the flow of money using a principle from physics: the conservation of energy. If we account for all the inflows and outflows of money, then we know that we can build an accurate picture of all of the money we’ve made and spent.

Bitcoin is particularly good at accounting in this sense, since transaction inflows and outflows are checked by code, with the latest state of the ledger stored in the UTXO set.

What about lightning? Every transaction is not stored on the blockchain, so we need same way to account for all the incoming and outgoing lightning transactions. Luckily for us, core-lightning (CLN) comes with a plugin that describes these transactions in detail!

For every transaction, CLN stores the amount credited and debited from your node: routed payments, invoices, etc. To access this, you just need to run the lightning-cli bkpr-listaccountevents command:

lightning-cli bkpr-listaccountevents | jq -cr '.events[] | [.type,.tag,.credit_msat,.debit_msat,.timestamp,.description] | @tsv' > events.txt

This will save a tab-separated file with some basic information about each credit and debit event on your node.

channel  invoice  232000000  0        1662187126  Havana
channel  invoice  2050000    0        1662242391  coinos voucher
channel  invoice  0          1002203  1662463949  lightningpicturebot
channel  invoice  300000     0        1663110636  [["text/plain","jb55's lightning address"],["text/identifier","jb55@sendsats.lol"]]
channel  invoice  0          102626   1663483583  Mile high lightning club 

Now here’s comes the cool part, we can take this data and build a ledger-cli file. ledger is a very powerful command-line accounting tool built on a plaintext transaction format. Using the tab-separated file we got from CLN, we can build a ledger file with a chart-of-accounts that we can use for detailed reporting. To do this, I wrote a script for converting bkpt reports to ledger:

http://git.jb55.com/cln-ledger

The ledger file looks like so:

2023-05-31      f10074c748917a2ecd8c5ffb5c3067114e2677fa6152d5b5fd89c0aec7fd81c5
        expenses:zap:1971       1971000 msat
        assets:cln      -1971000 msat

2023-05-31      damus donations
        income:lnurl:damus@sendsats.lol -111000 msat
        assets:cln      111000 msat

2023-05-31      Zap
        income:zap:event:f8dd1e7eafa18add4aa8ff78c63f17bdb2fab3ade44f8980f094bdf3fb72d512       -10000000 msat
        assets:cln      10000000 msat

Each transaction has multiple postings which track the flow of money from one account to another. Once we have this file we can quickly build reports:

Balance report

Here’s the command for “account balance report since 2023-05 in CAD”

$ ledger -b 2023-05-01 -S amount -X CAD -f cln.ledger bal

 CAD5290  assets:cln
 CAD2202  expenses
  CAD525    routed
 CAD1677    unknown
CAD-7492  income
 CAD-587    unknown
 CAD-526    routed
CAD-1515    lnurl
 CAD-614      jb55@sendsats.lol
   CAD-1        tipjar
 CAD-537      damus@sendsats.lol
 CAD-364      gpt3@sendsats.lol
CAD-4012    merch
CAD-2571      tshirt
CAD-1441      hat
 CAD-852    zap
 CAD-847      event
  CAD-66        30e763a1206774753da01ba4ce95852a37841e1a1777076ba82e068f6730b75d
  CAD-60        f9cda1d7b6792e5320a52909dcd98d20e7f95003de7a813fa18aa8c43ea66710
  CAD-49        5ae0087aa6245365a6d357befa9a59b587c01cf30bd8580cd4f79dc67fc30aef
  CAD-43        a4d44469dd3db920257e0bca0b6ee063dfbf6622514a55e2d222f321744a2a0e
         ...
------------
           0

As we can see it shows a breakdown of all the sats we’ve earned (in this case converted to fiat). We can have a higher-level summary using the depth argument:

$ ledger -M -S amount -X sat -f cln.ledger bal

 sat14694904  assets:cln
  sat6116712  expenses
  sat1457926    routed
  sat4658786    unknown
sat-20811616  income
 sat-1630529    unknown
 sat-1461610    routed
 sat-4207647    lnurl
sat-11144666    merch
 sat-2367164    zap
------------
           0

As we can see we made 14 million sats this month, not bad! The number at the bottom balances to zero which means we’ve properly accounted for all income and expenses.

Daily Damus Donation Earnings

To support damus, some users have turned on a feature that sends zaps to support damus development. This simply sends a payment to the damus@sendsats.lol lightning address. Since we record these we can build a daily report of damus donations:

$ ledger -D -V -f cln.ledger reg damus

23-May-15 - 23-May-15         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-46      CAD-46
23-May-16 - 23-May-16         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-73     CAD-120
23-May-17 - 23-May-17         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-41     CAD-161
23-May-18 - 23-May-18         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-37     CAD-197
23-May-19 - 23-May-19         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-35     CAD-233
23-May-20 - 23-May-20         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-28     CAD-261
23-May-21 - 23-May-21         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-19     CAD-280
23-May-22 - 23-May-22         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-29     CAD-309
23-May-23 - 23-May-23         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-19     CAD-328
23-May-24 - 23-May-24         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-25     CAD-353
23-May-25 - 23-May-25         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-36     CAD-390
23-May-26 - 23-May-26         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-37     CAD-426
23-May-27 - 23-May-27         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-25     CAD-451
23-May-28 - 23-May-28         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-25     CAD-476
23-May-29 - 23-May-29         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-12     CAD-488
23-May-30 - 23-May-30         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-29     CAD-517
23-May-31 - 23-May-31         ..damus@sendsats.lol      CAD-21     CAD-537

Not making bank or anything but this covered the relay server costs this month!

Hopefully ya’ll found this useful, feel free to fork the script and try it out!