Sending and receiving payments

Payments in Lightning are invoice based.

The recipient creates an invoice with the expected <amount> in millisatoshi (or "any" for a donation), a unique <label> and a <description> the payer will see:

lightning-cli invoice <amount> <label> <description>

This returns some internal details, and a standard invoice string called bolt11 (named after the BOLT #11 lightning spec).

The sender can feed this bolt11 string to the decodepay command to see what it is, and pay it simply using the pay command:

lightning-cli pay <bolt11>

Note that there are lower-level interfaces (and more options to these interfaces) for more sophisticated use.