BitPilot

Use Bitcoin for something useful. Learn what you need along the way.

BitPilot is a beginner-friendly onboarding app organized around practical outcomes: receiving a payment, sending money, securing savings, publishing independently, or contributing to an open-source project.

Instead of starting with a large curriculum, learners choose a concrete task and complete a short journey by:

• sending payments
• scanning QR codes
• creating identities
• completing simple tasks

The full Bitcoin, Lightning, Nostr, eCash, self-custody, privacy, sovereignty, and open-source mission library remains available as an optional exploration mode.

Built for:

• workshops
• hackathons
• classrooms
• communities
• self-learning

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Features

• Mission-based onboarding
• Learn → Quiz → Do flow
• Real Lightning & Nostr interactions
• Facilitator dashboard
• Beginner-friendly UX
• SQLite-powered backend
• Rust + React stack

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Stack

Backend

• Rust
• Axum
• SQLx
• SQLite

Frontend

• React
• TypeScript
• Vite

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Running Locally

Backend

cd backend
cargo run

Runs on:

http://localhost:8080

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Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Runs on:

http://localhost:5173

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Project Structure

bitpilot/
├── backend/     Rust API server
├── frontend/    React frontend
└── README.md

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Current Status

BitPilot currently uses:

• simulated rewards
• optional LNbits integration
• SQLite local storage

No real funds are required to use the app.

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Running a weekly challenge

A challenge is a themed public leaderboard over a mission subset and a time window. The easiest way to create one is the app itself: open the landing page, scroll to "Community challenges", and hit "Run a weekly challenge". The form offers the theme presets below, shows the share link, and displays the facilitator token once.

Prefer scripting it? The same endpoint takes a single request (creation is open, like session creation; rate limiting controls abuse):

curl -s -X POST https://<your-backend>/api/challenges \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "title": "Lightning week",
    "blurb": "Receive and send your first Lightning payment.",
    "missions": [21, 22, 23, 24],
    "starts_at": 1760000000,
    "ends_at": 1760604800
  }'

The response contains the challenge id (share https://<your-app>/?challenge=<id> as the public page; it shows the missions, a join button while live, and the read-only leaderboard) and a facilitator_token for the live facilitator dashboard of the backing session. Completions count only between starts_at and ends_at (unix seconds).

Theme ideas that map cleanly onto the catalogue:

Theme	Missions
Understand a transaction	[6, 7, 19]
First Lightning payment	[21, 22, 23, 24]
Publish your first note	[13, 14, 26]
Seed phrase bootcamp	[11, 12, 41]

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Vision

BitPilot aims to make Bitcoin onboarding:

• simple
• interactive
• practical
• beginner-friendly

especially for communities that are new to Bitcoin and Lightning.

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License

MIT License.