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That's a hard question because I don't feel like we have any pre-requisites at all. It's all about fit with the team. One of our employees used to work in the airline industry before coming to us. So we don't necessarily look for X, Y, and Z. It's more about "Are you a smart person that's eager to learn and fit in with the team we have". We have been very luck in being able to find a full team of incredible people.

My management style is very hands off. I'm not anyone's baby sitter. But on the contrary I'm there when you need me. I want to make sure everyone is taken care of in whatever they need. We all got a 'get shit done' attitude at Voltage so it works well. I empower employees to do their best and have the freedom to make their own decisions.

My background is in infrastructure engineering. I've also been in Bitcoin since 2012. So naturally, I really understood infra/devops really well and when I tried to set up my own Lightning node on a raspberry pi it was the worst dev experience I ever had. I knew we could do better.

Surge will differ in a lot of ways. #1 is its time series. RTL/TH are point in time right now. So instead of seeing what your peers are doing right now, you'll be able to be see what they were doing for the last week+. Additionally we're bringing a lot of the Observability practices that exist in the standard tech space into Lightning. Like Alerts, Security, Analysis, etc.

We're about to start opening it up to select beta testers in September and expanding from there.

It will have an agent that will be OSS and will be able to be run locally. The Surge service itself will be hosted for us by now, but eventually will probably be able to run the whole stack locally.

Right now we're really focused on solving the business use case. So small to large businesses are who we work with the most. Over time I think we'll be able to service a wider spectrum. We have ideas and plans to solve problems for both individual users as well as the largest enterprises. They're needs are very different so it will take time to solve the problems, but we are creating a Lightning platform. That's going to be applicable to everyone.

Great question. So I started Voltage because it was my Ikigai. It was clear a service like this was needed in the space and I felt like I had the ability to solve the need.

For the more practical side of things, I wrote the Voltage platform on my own in my nights and weekends while I had a full time job. I launched it and tried to just get users by talking to people and spreading the word. It started to take off enough that I was able to raise some venture capital money to help sustain it (Infra hosting is not cheap) and started hiring. Things have been rolling since!

Biggest highlight is to stay nimble early. This is a totally new technology and every day you gotta question your assumptions and ensure you are solving the right problems at the right time.

Yes, working on CoreLN right now. Taro is interesting, I think it's too early to say exactly how it's going to play out. Certainly a lot of interest from others and something we'll keep an eye on. No, I don't think block size will hinder LN and Taro.

So I'm honestly not big into books and I never have been. However I read all day every day on the internet (articles, research, etc).

But the piece of reading that has meaningfully changed my life is the Silk Road forums back in the day. When you think about the SR Forums you probably think about a bunch of druggies talking about their favorite dealer of coke, but it really wasn't that at all. It was this community of technologists that shared a common view on the world and individual freedoms. I learned so much from that community and it was an incredible learning experience for both technology (Tor, PGP, Bitcoin) and liberty (freedom, choice, values).

Thank you! We appreciate your support.

There's so many things to build and things change rapidly in our environment. So we always gotta be making sure we're building the right solution for the right user at the right time. 12 months is like 5 years in Lightning haha. But to answer the question, we want to expand the platform to make hosting even better (more geographical hosting locations, more apps, more implementations, etc). The most immediate new product is Surge which helps node operators with observability. We also want to solve a lot of issues around liquidity, as well as making Lightning easier to integrate noncustodially for companies. This is a lot of things and our roadmap is ambitious. But we need all of these services to really drive LN forward.

Haha, predictions like this are always hard and never right. Say a 10% MoM growth and we'd be at ~6,825 BTC.

I think 2023 will be a bigger year for liquidity. There's a lot of Bitcoin sitting on the side lines that wants to be deployed into the network. We just gotta create the tools and services to make it easier to deploy. Stay tuned on that one

I think things are going to spread more than they already are. There's so much that's possible to separate various pieces of the Bitcoin stack. So I think over time there's 30 ways interact with the Lightning Network instead of 2 or 3. This sounds overwhelming because of the options, but there will be clear paths based on what you want to accomplish.

It's possible for the at-home node stuff to proliferate, but we're a long way off. There's so many issues still out there like liquidity, remote access, etc. We gotta make it as easy as using a toaster, and we're not close to that. So it's possible, but alluding to my answer above, maybe it's not every single thing running in your home node, but only pieces.

We definitely have a lot of lightning enthusiasts that use us. Some advantages are the remote node (can move around freely), low cost to get started, and instant setup. So if you just want to play around with Lightning we are still a good solution for that. However a lot of efforts are put toward the business use case. These will converge over time however. (Think easy, medium, hard modes of the same platform) You can run a lightning node on Voltage for $12 a month and when you want to move to a several hundred dollar node at home you can.

CLN is in progress. So much to do so it takes a while, but its definitely being worked on and in progress.

Great question and yes I do think we can do that. There's more developments that need to happen but it's something we're working on and I know others are too. I think we can definitely get more users interacting with Lightning without going straight custodial.

This is really hard today because essentially the only option to today nontcustodially is to setup a node, manage liquidity, all that. Most people don't want to do that. So as soon as we can abstract more of that away, then noncustodial Lightning will be the way people enter bitcoin.