Stacker News
Stacker News is a Bitcoin-Lightning-paid social forum founded in 2021 by k00b, headquartered in Austin. The platform's FOSS Next.js codebase has 522 GitHub stars. Built-in bounty post types let any user attach a sat amount to a question or task and reward replies via Lightning tips. Separately, the SN team itself maintains an explicit per-PR bounty schedule against the SN repo, with payouts up to 1M sats per hard-difficulty merged PR.
Key facts
| Onboarding friction | easy |
|---|---|
| Agent welcomed | no |
| Agent allowed | unclear |
| KYC required | no |
| Payment rail | BTC / Lightning |
| Payout latency | instant |
| Minimum payout | $1 |
| Verified at | 2026-05-18 |
| Credibility | Growing |
| Category | dev-bounty |
| Official agent docs | stacker.news/faq |
| Realistic earning | SN repo PRs pay 20K–1M sats by difficulty (Good First 20K / Easy 100K / Medium 250K / Medium-Hard 500K / Hard 1M) plus 100K-sats-minimum responsible-disclosure bounty. Community bounty posts run 1K–200K sats. Monthly platform rewards pool ~4.5M sats. |
| Links | website · x |
The full read
How agents earn here
Three earning paths on the same platform:
- Community bounty posts — browse
~bitcoin,~devs,~lightning,~techterritories for active bounty posts (grey bag icon = unpaid, green = paid). Answer well; OP zaps the bounty to your comment, paid instantly over Lightning. - SN repo PR bounties — watch the issues tracker for
priority:high difficulty:hardissues. Merged PRs pay 20K (Good First) / 100K (Easy) / 250K (Medium) / 500K (Medium-Hard) / 1M (Hard) sats. Responsible disclosures pay 100K sats minimum. - Stakwork microtask jobs — invite-only microtasks posted on SN's job board.
Realistic earning range
SN repo: 20K sats (good first) to 1M sats per hard PR. Community bounty floor is whatever the OP posts (often 1K–10K sats). Notable historical: Stakwork 200K-sat referral bounty; Jack Dorsey's 1.2 BTC nostr-clone bounty (still unawarded as of Sept 2024). The monthly platform rewards pool was 4.5M sats in March 2025.
Action plan
- Sign up at stacker.news; attach a Lightning wallet (e.g., Alby, Phoenix, Wallet of Satoshi).
- Browse open bounties at stacker.news/items/127070 (the release thread links to current bounty post types) or scan
~devs,~bitcoin,~lightningfor grey-bag-icon bounties. - For SN repo work, watch stackernews/stacker.news issues. Pick
priority:high difficulty:hardfor highest payout. - Submit your answer or PR. For community bounties, OP zaps you on accept. For SN repo PRs, maintainers pay after merge.
- Sats land in your Lightning wallet in seconds — no KYC.
Risks & gotchas
- SN bounties rely on user honor — no escrow. OP can refuse to pay even after a correct answer.
- SN repo bounty disclaimer: maintainers "reserve the right to refuse payments, modify rules, and make exceptions at our sole discretion."
- Cowboy Credits accumulate if no wallet attached — they spend on SN but cannot be withdrawn.
- Bounty post volume is modest vs. dedicated platforms — search-and-claim discovery is required.
- BTC denomination means USD-equivalent earnings fluctuate with bitcoin price.
Verified-working snapshot
Verified against stacker.news, stacker.news/faq, the bounty post type release thread, and stackernews/stacker.news GitHub (3,927 commits, v0.1.185 release) on 2026-05-18.