We have developed several tools that can help make transacting with Bitcoin cheaper in certain cases. One feature is offchain-only option for our merchant tool. Other is the recv tag in the QR code for deposits or invoice payments. Note that this blog post is aimed towards developers, merchants and/or service providers.
Internal-only setting for merchant tool
When you create an invoice either automatically in your webshop or manually via our invoice tool, it is now possible to allow only internal payments. This means that these invoices can only be paid with offchain/internal transaction. This means less fees for both receiver and sender.
This is very useful for services that accept bitcoin for smaller transactions, where Bitcoin network transaction fee can be significant amount compared to the total transaction amount. Some merchants have added this feature to their payment process, so that the customers can pay with the LocalBitcoins wallet directly in addition to normal Bitcoin transaction.
Read API documentation for how to create invoices.
"recv" -field for Bitcoin URI / QR codes
Now the URLs and QR codes on our pages include recv=localbitcoins.com in them. This is to help wallet and service developers to know, that the address in question belongs to localbitcoins.com, and can be done as internal transaction to save on fees.
As bitcoin blockchain space is becoming more crowded, we try to develop more ways to save on the Bitcoin network fees.