Inspect a BOLT11 Lightning invoice

⚠️ DANGEROUS: use at your own risk. Code that handles keys and signs transactions should always be read and audited by you before you trust it with real funds. Used incorrectly, it can destroy your money.

bolt11 decodes a BOLT11 Lightning invoice to its fields and re-encodes it byte-identically. It is offline, holds no keys, and signs nothing. It is a reader: blocktools builds and signs on-chain transactions, not the live Lightning channel protocol (commitments, HTLCs, routing), which needs a running node and is out of scope. Use bolt11 to see exactly what an invoice asks for — the amount, the destination node, the description, the expiry — before you pay it from whatever Lightning wallet you use.

bolt11 <invoice>              # decode: one JSON line of fields
bolt11 --reencode <invoice>   # re-encode and report whether it is byte-identical

The decode recovers the payee node pubkey from the signature (recovered_payee), so you learn who the invoice is really payable to even when the invoice carries no explicit payee field. A tampered checksum or signature is rejected (nonzero exit); a string that is not a Lightning invoice is rejected with not_a_lightning_invoice.

Fields you get: network, currency, amount_msat (absent for a zero-amount/donation invoice), timestamp, payment_hash, description (or description_hash), payment_secret, recovered_payee, expiry, and the raw tagged fields. Amounts are in millisatoshi: 2500u BTC = 2500 × 100,000 = 250,000,000 msat.

Before you pay an invoice

1. Decode it: bolt11 <invoice>.
2. Read it yourself. Check amount_msat is what you expect, recovered_payee is the node you mean to pay, the description matches the thing you are buying, and the expiry has not passed.
3. Pay from your own Lightning wallet. blocktools does not open channels or route payments.

Tested examples

Decode a public BOLT11 spec invoice (2500u, "1 cup coffee"); it recovers the spec node id and reports the amount in millisatoshi:

bolt11 lnbc2500u1pvjluezsp5zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zyg3zygspp5qqqsyqcyq5rqwzqfqqqsyqcyq5rqwzqfqqqsyqcyq5rqwzqfqypqdq5xysxxatsyp3k7enxv4jsxqzpu9qrsgquk0rl77nj30yxdy8j9vdx85fkpmdla2087ne0xh8nhedh8w27kyke0lp53ut353s06fv3qfegext0eh0ymjpf39tuven09sam30g4vgpfna3rh

A non-Lightning string is rejected (exit 2):

bolt11 bc1qw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4