Hey! This is Graham (Founder and CEO of Voltage). Great post and I appreciate the dialog. I think you are pretty spot on in the reasons I created Voltage. I didn't create it to suck up every LN node out there and be against people running their own nodes. In fact, Voltage and myself are big proponents of running your own node and we encourage it whenever possible. But the fact of the matter is, not everyone can do that.

For the individual, some people don't have the technical abilities to do all the required steps to run a node at home. Even if they do, the upfront costs of a node at home can be high and maybe they just want to try it out first. We see our platform as a stepping stone where they can learn and then maybe the later run a node at home.

For anything business/app related, a node at home isn't really practical, you must put it in a datacenter. For small apps, all you really want to do is work on your app, not managing the node itself. Similarly for larger businesses, hiring out a team to do all the Lightning things is a big task and most places will just ignore Lightning if the lift is that big. To really boost adoption in this stage, we must make it very easy and that's what we're trying to do.

Additionally, there is a whole lot of things we're working on to make it even better/more trustless/more redundant to run a node on Voltage. So this is really just phase 1 and things will improve over time. Lightning isn't consensus so there is a much wider range of trust models and delegation that's possible while still being sovereign. I said this on my recent TFTC interview, but if Lightning is so hard that the only way to use it is custodial then we've failed. So ultimately, to boost adoption we must make it easy for those interested but we also must keep the ethos of Bitcoin. This is just the beginning and so much more to do!

I wouldn't use it for a personal node, it's better to self host if you can. At The Bitcoin Company we use voltage for our lightning node and it has been great, highly recommend it for enterprise services

Voltage.cloud is great for:

• Businesses: If you need to be highly accessible to receive and send payments, it's a really good option, unless you have your own highly reliable infrastructure at the office.

• New users: Spin up a node and experience Thunderhub and other tools available. Good for learning LN cheaply even if you intend to later run your own node.

• Developers: If you need multiple nodes for various purposes, including on testnet.

• Private individuals in developing regions: If your infrastructure doesn't allow running your own node, you may have no choice. For example, in some regions power or internet connection goes out often, and thus running your own node is painful.

• Frequent travellers: You may be living in a highly developed country but you move or travel a lot, and you may not feel comfortable leaving your node behind, or taking it offline and carrying it in your luggage around the world.

However, if you can, do run your own node. It's better for privacy, and sovereignity. Voltage.cloud or their service providers could be theoretically be ordered by a government to stop operations and they may have to comply, and in those situations your funds could be at risk. You would have to force close channels, and recover funds with your seed.

I just discovered LNBits on Voltage.

Works like a charm.

I have personally found it helpful to keep the momentum going while developing my side project. It allows me to focus on building core features for the product rather than waiting for the node materials, syncing and possibly getting stuck in the setup. With something as finicky as motivation for a side project, this was huge.

I don't think anyone of note makes the mistake that running an LN node is a terribly profitable enterprise, in fact I'm pretty sure that by and large it's a loss. But more nodes helps the network so it seems like a good idea to offer the delegation of this service.

There is a lot of work going on all over the place to find ways to make such activities fully trustless and Voltage would for sure therefore be motivated to develop this to bolster their offering.

It's very exciting to see all the efforts in the ecosystem aimed towards improving this technology. Really, it's already passed the point where it is such a massive amount of monetary liquidity that it's starting to give alternatives to the established payment clearinghouse systems like Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex the heat.

I have just been reading about academic work being done to further reduce the on-chain footprint of channels, maybe interesting to you all: https://tik-old.ee.ethz.ch/file//a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7cba96/Scalable_Funding_Of_Blockchain_Micropayment_Networks%20%281%29.pdf

As a developer working on protocols that build on top of lightning, I'm keeping my eyes open for anything and everything related to onboarding the world to Bitcoin.

I looked into it. I thought the pricing was a bit much and the options are extremely limited to only LND over tor. Waiting for them to offer. Clearnet node with CLN as well

I don't agree with the notion that it's useless to run multiple nodes. I'd say the large majority of Voltage users also run a node at home.

I think it has its place in the ecosystem, I think with countries like my own where electricity is not a given, having a back up you can use to keep routing payments is important

Voltage? Well, in these current times resisting their potential.