A Lightning invoice is a request for a fixed amount that is valid only until a time stamp inside it, and after that time, no payment against it will be accepted. Casino invoices usually expire in ten to fifteen minutes. Your own wallet’s invoices, which the casino pays when you withdraw, often expire in an hour by default, though some wallets set it shorter. An expired invoice cannot be paid, but nothing is lost when one expires, because the coins never leave the sender until the payment succeeds.
The three pairs below show the difference between paying inside the window and after it, at the three points where an invoice appears at most crypto roulette sites.
Deposit
- Before expiry – You open the cashier, choose Lightning, enter an amount, and the site generates an invoice with a QR code and an expiry countdown. You pay it from a Lightning wallet, the payment routes in a few seconds, and the balance is credited at once. The invoice is marked paid and cannot be paid twice.
- After expiry – The QR code is still on screen, but the countdown has hit zero. Your wallet attempts the payment and receives a rejection from the casino’s node within a second or two. No coins have moved. The cashier shows the invoice as expired and offers a button to create a new one. Generate it, pay within the window, and the deposit goes through as normal.
Mid-session top-up
- Before expiry – You are between spins, the balance is low, and you generate a top-up invoice. The betting timer on the table keeps running while you pay. A payment made within a minute of generating the invoice lands well inside the window, and the balance updates before the next spin closes.
- After expiry – You generate the invoice, get distracted by a run at the table, and come back to it twenty minutes later. The payment fails. The coins are still in your wallet. The only cost is the time to generate a fresh invoice, and the only risk is paying a stale one from a screenshot, which fails the same way. Always pay from the live cashier page.
Withdrawal
- Before expiry – You create an invoice in your own wallet for the amount you want, paste it into the casino’s withdrawal form, and submit. The casino’s node pays it, usually within a minute for amounts under the automatic threshold, and the coins arrive with the payment confirmation.
- After expiry – Your invoice expired while the withdrawal sat in a review queue, which can happen on larger amounts that wait for manual approval. The casino’s payment attempt fails, and the withdrawal is returned to your balance rather than lost. Most sites email you to request a new invoice. When you make the replacement, set the expiry in your wallet to a day or more so it outlives the review.
Two settings prevent almost every expiry. On deposits, generate the invoice only when you are ready to pay it, since a ten-minute window is long if you pay at once and short if you wander off. On withdrawals, set your wallet’s invoice expiry long enough to cover the site’s review time, which the cashier states, and longer than that on a weekend. The invoice is a time-limited request, and the whole system is built so that a missed window costs a retry and nothing else.