TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #209: Graham Krizek

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Graham Krizek, Founder of Voltage, to discuss: - Graham's Bitcoin journey - Starting Voltage - The Lightning Network + node operators - Necessary infrastructure - Encrypting data in the cloud - Security tradeoffs - Cloud Computing landscape - Centralization risks - much more Follow Graham on Twitter Check out Voltage Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Graham Krizik from the Voltage team, helping to build hosting services for Lightning users, so they can use Lightning without having to maintain their own node. Sorry, I can't speak this morning, freaks. Hey, Winston. Winston, have you heard about the Cache app? Cash App's helping you stack sats, send sats, sell sats, receive sats. We're saying sats, sats, sats, sats, sats,

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If you want to buy daily, weekly, biweekly, you can set that up in the app. we have front running matt odell who's buying at 4 17 a.m eastern time i found out so we got a front run him somebody's got to wake up at 4 15 uh two minute front run of matt odell there on top of that you can stack slivers of stonks on the apps uh you can uh use the cash app as your bank account they're offering account number and routing numbers for individuals who don't want to use a traditional bank you can get your paychecks direct deposited into the cash app you get their boost card accepted anywhere visa is accepted you save money at boost partner merchants there's a bunch of things going on so when you do download the cash app make sure you

use the code stacking sats it's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars is going to go to owls lacrosse winston that's owls lacrosse stacking sats owls lacrosse winston what do you think about the cash app you're a dog you're not even going to be able to use it. Sucks for you. Enjoy this episode. of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be well hey there freaks at your boy marty bent here to introduce what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt at your boy marty here

coffee rip friday morning vibes are high very excited for this conversation sitting down with Graham Krizik, founder of Voltage. Just as I start the conversation, I have my son screaming in the background, so sorry if he's bothering you, Graham. How are you doing this morning? I'm good. What's up, freaks? Happy to be here.

I've wanted to say that for a long time. Thank you for listening. Yeah. It's, I guess we've been in contact, what, the last few weeks? we ryan and i discussed what you were building at voltage before recording uh and while we're recording uh instead i had to reach out uh the service that you're providing basically allowing people to spin up lightning nodes in the cloud uh i would argue is going to be completely necessary as we attempt to scale out this network we'll get into exactly what you're doing

at voltage why you built it how it works and what you offer individuals but before that how did you come to bitcoin how did you uh get to a point where you decided to build a company focused on uh allowing people to have a better experience in the lightning network particularly yeah sure uh so i originally found out about bitcoin about mid 2011 so a little while ago um the i first came to it be by learning about the silk road um heard there's this website you can like buy and sell anything on and you know no one could stop you know prevent you from doing that essentially like and i was really fascinated by how like how is this possible how are people not able to shut down these servers like you know just stop the bank accounts like uh like how is it

possible that people can't censor this and so i started learning more about it and i found you know bitcoin tor pgp encryption um all of the the stuff that powered the silk road and i was just fascinated by it i was just really hooked at like the the economic properties the technology behind it like it was really just like so eye-opening to me um i was just really hooked from there um so that was like mid 2011 uh i kind of just stayed with it as like a hobby for a while and just kind like bought and sold with people in like local bitcoins did a little bit on mount gox uh kind of just played around with it for a while um ended up uh i guess i was when i was starting my freshman year of college um so i played with it through college um switched my major several

times through college ended up getting a business degree and going straight into software like uh software engineer so by the time i learned i wanted to be a software engineer it would have been way too much money and way too many more years of school so i just did business and then uh, went to a software engineer by trade. Um, so over the last several years, I've focused on, um, like cloud infrastructure essentially through, uh, with, through software engineering, um, and still maintaining that, uh, that Bitcoin, you know, as a hobby and, you know, during the 2017, you know, ICO craziness, uh, I participated in a lot of like, uh, hackathons and stuff like that. And like Ethereum projects, just cause that was, you know, the new thing to

do and uh it was fun and oddly enough all of those ethereum like hackathons always paid out in bitcoin so i was always trying to win bitcoin um through these ethereum projects uh so it was cool to see um i after kind of 2017 was cooled down uh i kind of wanted to like get back to my roots and focus more on like bitcoin core so i started looking at like what i could contribute there uh i don't know c++ very well so like contributing directly to the code was like probably not i wasn't probably not going to do that so uh i focused on their cicd platform tried to make some of their testing and you know their test suites and uh a lot of their automation a little better so uh worked on that for a little bit and then um i got hooked up with uh travis cling and

the guys at ekai asset management um awesome people you know shout out ekai um started work with them for a while built out some of their quantitative infrastructure and uh a lot of what they do um on the technology side um worked with them for a while once that came to a close i was really kind of like man what am i going to do next like i've been kind of going like on this bitcoin thing for a while just doing random things like what what should i do next um i decided to look at lightning again i originally looked at lightning in like 2018 um and it was very you know that was like very very early days so um it was cool but it wasn't built out like it is today um so i started want to take a second look at it i tried to set up a node on a raspberry pi at home and it was like

it was just a horrible process like nothing would work my disk got corrupted and like power failures you know corrupted lnd database it was just it was a mess and so i was like man this is this is not fun so i'm gonna try and spin it up in the cloud because like that's what i know and love um so i did that and it was way easier in that and i was like man how like okay not everyone can just go spin up a cloud server you know not know everyone has that knowledge to go how to know how to do that um so there's got to be a service that's like offering this like for people right so i look and look and look and like there's nothing out there that's really doing it so i found that interesting so i started basically building the creating the building blocks of

you know what would that take to have a host of lightning node service um and i really just never stopped um everything kind of kept lining up like uh the the ideas i had on how to build it you know all kind of made sense and worked out and the more people i talked to you know people really pumped about it and thought it was a great service so it uh just kept building and never really stopped and that's i guess where we are today with you know voltage being a an official service now that uh you know you can sign up with yeah i mean i've experienced the same problems that you did too and for our tftc store i didn't spin it up but i paid a developer to spin us up a node in the cloud just so we could have a hundred percent uptime and confidence that the store is going

to work right and yeah but we had to go through set up an aws cloud instance uh connect our node like just work via a ux flow that was not catered to a lightning node operator yeah um so i assume that's why i'm excited to be speaking with you today because that was somewhat of a very manual and chunky process um and it seems that what you're working on a voltage uh is is aiming to make that as seamless as possible so how does it work um what are the benefits uh what are the trade-offs i guess is a better question to pose for that particular question and then um uh like how does how does the the hardware infrastructure work like do you do you have the servers are they located in the u.s what's the deal with that as well sure so uh voltage is a

cloud infrastructure provider for bitcoin and lightning network so through our platform you're able to you know create a lightning node with just like a few clicks of a button it's it's ready in about two minutes um so we make it really easy for you to to create your own dedicated always on lightning node in the cloud and so you still maintain the ability to adjust your settings you know your funds everything is completely under your control what we automate is like backups your uptime the configurations the networking all of the like non-sexy stuff in the background that's what we handle for you and just give you like a nice ui with like you know a couple buttons and and you're off um so so that's what we do so uh when you're talking about um benefits i think

the benefits are probably obvious of like you don't have to you have to maintain hardware you don't have to do any of the the technical bits to like install lnd um when you're talking about upgrades like i know you've talked on your podcast a while about uh staying up to date with the latest releases and everything like that you know through our platform is one click and you know you're updated um so the the ease of use is uh is a big a big plus um the trade-off is um it's a trusted service it's not there's no way to run lightning nodes um in a trustless way right now um and that's just that's just kind of the nature of the beast um so how so how our system works is we um we i wrote a blog post about this that everyone should go read that is interested in it but

we have modified lnd um we we've modified the code in a few places and submitted prs back up to the upstream project but we do not write macaroons to disk ever so we never are able to see users credentials um we encrypt all sensitive information like your tls keys we can't we encrypt those to your seed so you can't we can't like man in the middle your requests and see you know what's going on grab passwords things like that um same with the tor private key um so we have modified lnd in a way to make it totally non-custodial meaning we we cannot see what's going on in your node we even if we wanted to go and like you know access see what transactions you're doing anything like that we can't even see your peers because we route through tor

so all we see is tor entry nodes um so we have made this um as secure and as uh you know non-custodial as possible um which is something that no one else in the space has done you know like i said the modifications we did to lnd were like you know we literally made and submitted them back up um so we we our platform is the most secure platform to run a lightning node um as it exists today um speaking more of the infrastructure side we do run on aws um so we run in the cloud they are us-based right now we're working on um co-locating to you know maybe european union or european zone for anyone that wants that um and so uh everything is encrypted all the time inside of our network and out um when you're talking about uh traffic going across

you know cross services inside of our network everything is encrypted to keys that we don't manage um and every all disks are encrypted the memory on the servers is encrypted uh so there's like literally nothing that is like ever like unencrypted um there's uh there like the only time is like you know when keys need to be signed through memory which is you know still the memory is encrypted so um through using you know a provider like aws you know we're able to scale like crazy um and we are able to get the best types of servers that are out there so like making sure that your node is as performant as you know humanly possible um and then we're able to still maintain that level of trust and security through um just encrypting it with you know things

that you know aws can't see and can't manage um so that's so that's that's a good rundown of our infrastructure and through that we are able to uh we're able to give a really nice service that is um very highly available and very scalable um while still maintaining that level um of of confidentiality and privacy that users want in lightning um so through that you know we can we like i said we can't see anything on your node we could not you know take your money if we if we wanted to um but at the end of the day you have to trust us to keep your node up um because that's if you know the whole if your node's down you know it can't sign messages that kind of thing so that's ultimately the only you know trade-off you have to take is that you are trusting us

to keep your node online so it can sign these messages and you know do do the things that it needs to do um but besides that i mean you are in complete control of your funds your you know your channels everything is is totally on you yeah it's pretty incredible that you're able to limit the i guess attack service surface uh as much as you guys have by encrypting everything and so let's dive into that like how does that work specifically i noticed uh last week you were um you quote tweeted oliver gugger who had a pr merged into lnd that's been sitting around for two and a half years uh that allows people like voltage to create nodes without leaving unencrypted macaroons behind on the infrastructure so i guess we should get into

yeah the nature of macaroons unencrypted versus encrypted macaroons and how you you achieve encryption yep so how like i guess lnd works today and like the latest version which is 0.11.1 The only way that you can manage macaroons are when you create an L&D instance, they're written to disk right beside the L&D database on the server. And that's how historically that has always been is they're just written to disk right beside it. And for those that don't know,

your macaroon is essentially your credential into the L&D instance. It's what you use to send money, look at your transactions, all of that stuff. It controls the funds. And so historically, it's always been written to disk. Well, Oliver did two and a half years ago that just got merged in, I think, last week. He created a modification where you can pass in a flag

when you're initializing or unlocking your LND node to have it pass back the macro and the API response instead of writing it to disk. So by doing that and by keeping everything encrypted from the user's request to the node process itself, we are never able to see the macro so it's never written to disk we don't have to like ever worry about that and it's passed back directly to the client so the user you know it's client side at that point and you know we have we're not able to ever see that in the process and so how we do it

to what we do at that point is encrypt it to the user's password that they use to unlock you know their node or their the password they set up for their node um we encrypt it to to their password and then we back it up on on our into our api and so what we the backup we have is still encrypted to the password so if you lose your password you know you're still sol and we can't do anything about it but by encrypting it to the password we're able to make it um a really nice uh way to connect in so through our dashboard if you want to connect we have a bunch of easy connection options for like lnd connect from like zap zeus you know all of the popular uh software you we pat we essentially pass back that encrypted macaroon and then prompt you for your password

like hey you need to you know you need to unlock this so we can generate um a connection code for you and then once they unlock it we do that and that's all client side and our dashboard is open source so you can verify you know everything that i'm saying um you can see how like how what what requests we are sending to your node what requests are sending to our api um so by by creating a dashboard that you know manages both we can we can do those really nice things of okay you can we can get information from your node from our api but then your requests go straight to your node and we don't proxy anything in the middle um and and we also do that it's worth mentioning that we we make that possible by installing trusted ssl certificates on all of our lnd nodes so

that means that it's signed by a certificate provider so when you if you would pull up like your api in the dashboard it's you know has like the green lock in like google chrome meaning that like it's not a self-signed certificate it's trusted um and then through that we're able to make requests directly into your node um without having to do any kind of weird weird tricks it just works you know as it should in an api yeah very seems very well thought out from a security and privacy perspective i mean that's what so go ahead that's what i was gonna i was gonna go back to this particular pr like was this like low-key one of the sneakiest boons to lightning network privacy in a while i mean i think i think all interacting probably in terms of interacting with

services via lightning yeah i mean i think so i think oliver made this a while ago kind of with people like voltage in mind and also just for a way to for users to run on like maybe like less trusted hardware um and still get you know the same assurances um so i think they always had this in mind i think it took two and a half years it wasn't in development for two and a half years that frankly just kind of sat there for a while because i just think it wasn't a priority for anyone and it just you know things happened um and so yeah i mean so when we were designing this system that's what we that's what we wanted to do was create create a system that is like you know as secure and still maintains that level of like user privacy and control that you get when you're

running your own node um we wanted to maintain that even you know doing a hosted node solution and that's why that was like step step zero in building this was how can we run these nodes without having access to them um and if we couldn't do that we wouldn't have done this at all uh because that like you know we're we're bitcoiners like we want to ensure that privacy that you know that level of um security through the whole process and so that you know looking at you know the stateless and at pr and things like that we're we're definitely step zero in designing our our services because like i said i mean we we want the utmost privacy and control for our users and um if we couldn't do that we wouldn't have built it so uh luckily through you know several

modifications you know some updates to lnd we're able to achieve that in a in a way we're pleased with yeah that's fascinating and incredibly bullish in my mind that you guys are able to crack this not specifically and then lightning as a protocol was able to get this macaroon problem solved so that services like yours can be built and i guess that just naturally leads me to the question like is this how do we scale lightning i think is it there's a scale via companies like voltage a combination of voltages and uncle jim's around the world like what is what is a sufficient and comfortable trade-off for you in terms of hosted services versus uh do-it-yourself completely self-custody nodes running your own hardware yeah yeah so that's that's a it's a

great question so when so one of the biggest uh things i think you know as part of your question is um like centralization of the network um and i think so there's several things unpacked there and one so like let's have the scenario of 95 of the lightning network would be running on voltage you know say one day you know that that exists where 95 of the network is running on voltage we could we still could not do any kind of network level attacks like stealing routing fees or doing any of those things because what i just talked about of not being able to get into nodes so um when you're talking about security of the network we even if we ran like the whole network we could never you know steal fees any of that kind of trickery um when people are talking about

you know lightning vulnerabilities and how you could if you know if you set up enough nodes you can you know do some routing fee trickery stuff like that you know like that's not possible um we're so the way we see ourselves is we're uh we're definitely going to be aiding in like the bootstrapping of the network which i think we're still there you know i think we're at like 14 000 plus nodes on the network according to 1 ml um and you know we're we want to get to like a million plus nodes you know right we want like everyone running this um i guess a million is even low for everyone running a lighting node but uh so so we see this as a really good bootstrapping opportunity to where so if you want to run a node at home i mean you're looking at four or five

hundred dollars like all in to just like get started and play with it and like i think that's a pretty big non-starter for a lot of people um and then so you're left with the mobile wallets which are either custodial or don't have as many you can't do as much with those as you could with your own nodes so before voltage you're left with like those two options and neither one of them are that great and so uh through our service you can spend you know 10 bucks a month 30 bucks a month you know depending on what what plan you want uh and you can get online you know in two minutes to start playing with it so one we see it as a really good bootstrapping opportunity where people can get online quickly and then once they're more comfortable with lightning you know maybe they

move on to their own hardware you know like that's we we aren't a we we don't want to be you know running 100 of the network we want it to be a decentralized system where people are running their own nodes um people are using hosted services like us so we see it as one a really good opportunity to get people on board easily quickly and then maybe you know after they play with it for a little while they get comfortable and they're like all right i do want to run my own node at home i do want to do you know take the next step and go even deeper into this um so that's that's one uh important point to make the other is i mean there's going there is already like competition and there will be more competition so like there i don't think it'll be a one a one

provider for all um i think there'll be several um which increases the um the centralization aspect of it um and then uh another aspect of it is um we're we're inside of our own system say you know we do control a lot of the things we're very conscious of um dispersing like our work making it very ha dispersing our workloads across the world um into multiple zones multiple cloud providers um we're going to be doing that so it's uh so there we are reducing the single point of failure you know as much as possible through the network even um for those running on you know on voltage yeah i was going to be my next question do you plan on diversifying not away from aws but diversifying the service providers beyond them yeah yeah definitely we're that's on our roadmap

to um use multiple cloud providers use multiple locations across the world um that's all very easy to do it's just a matter of time um and so yeah we're that's definitely something that we're planning on doing it's fascinating how so how's reception been so far like do you find a lot of the people in engaging with voltage are individual users like do you guys service you envision yourself servicing a lot of enterprise clients exchanges anything like that yeah so it's been So when we launched first, we had our one plan, which is an LED node that is backed by a Bitcoin full node. And that is $27 a month.

So that was perfect for people like Jack from Thunder Games is running on Voltage now. We're working with the Sphinx people to run their tribes. We have Adam Curry as a Voltage user. So a lot of those people are really on board with it. As far as individual users go, they thought that $27 price point was a little high, which I get.

And so we introduced this last week called Lite Nodes, which are $10 a month, which are backed by Neutrino instead of a Bitcoin full node. So for people that are just trying to get a quick test node or just want a personal node, I think it works great and it's great for the personal aspect of it.

So yeah, so that's, I've read that blog post because you shared it in our TFTC tribe. Thank you for joining the tribe in Sphinx. um sphinx i keep saying sphinx sphinx uh and so does neutrino just from using less data i guess with the block header is that you're able to get a lower price at aws yeah so i mean essentially you don't like running running a bitcoin full node is expensive frankly and so uh you don't have to do that with neutrino it kind of just queries like the entire bitcoin network and you know does things uh without requiring a full bitcoin node to connect to so it's just it's a

cheaper infrastructure cost for us so then we can just you know just charge a cheaper price you know for the end user ultimately um it's just a matter of hardware at that point of we don't have to run a bitcoin full node for a neutrino based uh you know light node yeah yeah that's crazy so how again getting back to thunder games and sphinx how how did they see you as a service provider and and i mean just using sphinx this week uh it seems to be working pretty flawlessly at least the the lightning payments and and streaming payments and boosting uh podcasts like mid episode the experience they're building there is pretty pretty sweet yeah so i think so originally like we that's what we hear like by from like a majority of our customers is like

man like this is great like i do did not want to run my own servers but i just had to but by necessity i heard a lot of people running like btc pay server just for a lightning node because it was like the easiest way to set it up so those people that you know were forced to run their own know just because like that was the only option um those people are really coming to us um in big numbers which is great um we're you know that's kind of the original target market essentially so so that's good to see so with people i'm really excited about what sphinx is building because i see that as like uh the one of the great use cases like originally um i i'm one of those people that think that uh the paying for coffee with lightning is going to be like much later i don't think

that's like the killer use case right now i think things like what sphinx is doing with podcasting um is definitely the way things are going to build out right now um there it's it's so cool to be able to like stream tftc and uh and just you know boost when i when you guys when i like something that you hear and uh being able to stream sats uh you know as uh as i listen um My wall is almost empty now because I listened to RHR last night and it damn near drained me. I'm sorry. I got to set the sats per minute at a reasonable rate.

No, that's fine. I just, I got to refill it. I've just, I've been using it too much. So, I mean, things like that is like, it's so cool. Well, let's jump into this. Why do you think the application of Lightning Network towards things like streaming payments and micropayments payments will come before buying coffee so i think it's so what gets me super amped up about

like bitcoin and lightning network and everything is just the peer-to-peer aspect of it which is you know kind of like you know a fundamental piece of it uh i i love the idea of being able to pay like a content creator directly and you know having it being like uncensorable uh you know spotify can't take it down they and you don't have to you don't have to do ads you know for revenue things like that being able to pay a content creator directly um that's so cool to me and thinking about like even like think about like netflix that does like instead of a subscription base you know you pay per minute of a video you're watching you know i don't know if people still like rent movies anymore but like if you did that you know instead of paying five bucks

for a movie that you maybe watch 15 minutes of and it sucks and you you know don't want to watch it anymore you just pay pay per minute and oh this sucks okay well i wasted five cents on this you know who cares um kind of thing i think it i think it just drastically uh makes us rethink you know the relationship between um you know the users and the content creators um and it makes that connection like you're the content creator is tied to to the user it's not their advertisers not to their the platform i think that it really just changes the whole dynamic on on the monetization and the connection between those two which is what i mean which is what you guys are doing with like you do the tribe and everything i mean i i know i what you guys talked about

rhr last night i think it's exactly i think let's dive into this i'd love to have this keep having this conversation and build on what matt and i discussed on rhr last night like the the incentive structure that this creates between the listener and the content creator i could sort of lights a fire under our ass to produce good content and like matt said last night like you can sort of get stats of of i don't want to say average minutes listened per podcast but you can sort of tell if you're making good points from the end and people are boosting it like hey people must be listening at least this far the way through or you actually you could probably actually tell by how many sets um are streamed to you by the number of downloads times the

sats per minute yeah ratio yeah yeah and i think it's um i mean i i think it's just it's it's great and i think that um yeah being able to get like that instant feedback from like you know you as a content creator too is is incredible and like you know being able to like boost oh yeah like on like specific quotes like oh these people really like when i say this like i'm gonna say this every episode kind of thing like i mean i think it gives you the ability uh as a content creator to to make something that you know your listeners really want to hear and um and just create good content and then the whole like unsensibility of it is like another big thing especially like today you know in today's world where uh is getting like the amount of censorship

is getting like freaky uh and so i think this stuff is like is gonna be you know more and more important you know by completely by the year i mean maybe maybe even quicker than that it seems like things are the pace of the censoring is quickening i mean the whole twitter like warning stuff i love that meme that's taken off this week of people just photoshopping uh revolutionaries throughout history and like twitter twitter uh fact checking them paul revere the british are coming yeah the british tax system yeah no that's that's hilarious what i think one of the greatest things that have come out of the selection is uh me the memeing um and the the content that has come out of it has been just gold um but yeah i mean when you like i i don't i i haven't dug into

it that much but i don't get how like jack dorsey he's such a bitcoiner but like how is twitter like censoring like this and like i i don't understand the connector between like jack and this and maybe he's like totally removed from it i don't know but it's crazy i agree it's disappointing to say the least right yeah um i don't know i get back i get a lot of shit having disclaimer cash app jack's also csu square sponsor no i mean i mean i've made this public before like i don't i feel bad for jack yeah i don't i would never want to be in that position and i question how much actual um power he has over the decision making on a lot of the stuff it goes on right right i don't know if i was if i was jack i would probably maybe ditch twitter and

just focus on building bitcoin everywhere either that or just if you you feel like your baby's being taken from you just put your fucking foot down be like yeah let's not do this anymore yep yep who knows um disclaimer sponsor the pop the uh he well you're you're seem very passionate about the ability to do things in a non-custodial way and avoid censorship and deplatforming what is it like were these values that were very important to you before discovering bitcoin and bitcoin sort of solidify them or has your bitcoin journey sort of brought these to the forefront of your mind so yeah a little bit of both like i've always been uh sort of like a i guess a libertarian minded person um and i think when i found like when you know when i found the silk road way back

in like 2011 uh i that's what i that's part of the reason i clung to it so much as well as like the whole liberty aspect of it and then you know it's like it was kind of like that fire was there in me and then seeing this community of people that are like you know making it happen and are like way more amped up about it than i am you know really i guess accelerated the fire um so it's been it's been uh something that i've always been passionate about but i think it's easy to get disgruntled uh about like the lack of control you have and um being you know censored or tracked or whatever and like in you know web 2 uh and through these google facebook twitter all of these places um you just have very little control and it's just extremely

hard and extremely tiring to like avoid the tracking uh and still like you know use use the tools like normal so i that's why i really that's why i really focus on it when building lightning and bitcoin is that we need to give people that option right like you basically don't have that option in web 2 so like we need to make that an option in web 3 and like that needs to be like a foundation on on how we're building this this next stage of the internet um because because it's like it's almost impossible to use like web 2 and not have have that you know in in your life in some way but not be tracked or whatever um so that's just i think that's ultimately why i'm so so passionate about now is like that that has to be an option like that is like not that is not an

option to me that like that's not a compromise like that is a foundational building block and how we need to do this next step yeah it seems like we're at a crossroads like we either figure this out fix this by building these distributed um very hard to sensor systems or just get get the panopticon thrown on top of us yeah yeah high stakes very high stakes i mean it is it is and that's what i i that's why i mean that's why i like building you know this stuff so much and i think that it's uh i see we're just still so early too and like it's it's kind of easy i think it's easy to get a little disgruntled too on like i mean like why is this not like you know panning out faster kind of thing but i mean we're still like so early you know comparing it to like

early days of the internet or you know email whatever you want to do i mean we're still like we're still super early so uh those things will come you know i think things like sphinx and whatnot are um are the are the necessary tools to uh to start building this stuff and like you know this like uh maybe sphinx is like our netscape in lightning i don't know and then we you know just go from there well it's interesting to see what we're doing get validated by ogs like adam curry uh podfather who's very passionate about keeping this particular content medium as distributed as possible and the fact that just naturally uh gravitationally pulled to lightning as a tool to to enable

uh the possibility that podcasting can stay distributed it's pretty cool to see yeah it is and it's cool i think what i like about adam a lot is like he just he he's always gotten it i guess like there's like some people that take a lot of convincing whatever um adam kind of he seemed to like just it clicked for him that like man this is like this is the perfect way that we can keep podcasting distributed and you know pay you know content creators directly all that stuff so it's been it's been really cool to work with sphinx and adam um and i mean i'm i'm super excited uh on you know what's to come with that yeah i'm fanboying out it's in the tftc tribe yeah listen to the rhr last night i was like whoa yeah yeah yeah yeah it's been cool

so how do you see voltage evolving from here like do you do have i know you said you want to diversify cloud providers and stuff like that but do you have product um features in mind that you sort of haven't discussed publicly or yeah to build in the future yeah so i mean we have like the the list of things we want to build is like is just enormous um but so what what we're ultimately you know building with voltage is a we're going to be offering tools to manage like the entire life cycle of how you use bitcoin and lightning so we're going to be you know building like developer tools so if you know when you're building on lightning um we it'll be a very easy process to start using you know the apis or uh just doing tests on your app stuff like that

um and then uh you know obviously the deployment and hosting um is going to be a core feature and then also expanding into like uh e-commerce solutions um finance tools um the the possibilities are endless i mean when you are you know we're kind of focusing on the core product right now of building out like hosted nodes and then what is possible you know once you know once you have the hosted nodes is like is is very is very big you know there's a lot that we can do there's a lot that we want to do um so i don't have like i don't want to get too uh into detail about all of the specific things but that's ultimately what we're shooting for is a way to you know develop test deploy host and then you know and then then and then some on voltage uh to make the entire

the entire process going you know developing apps on bitcoin and lightning to accept them in your stores or you want to do like i know you you guys talked about how you hate the the li-fi the lefi comment whatever you want to call it you know finance on lightning you know doing doing things like that as well so we're we're really gonna you know take it take a big chunk out of how people use use and develop on lightning and really try and drive that forward because I think that's a big pain point we see right now is it's it can be hard to develop on lightning across teams especially um and then you know there's obviously big pain points you know through through the whole process ongoing yeah it seems like this is a very integral operation in the order of operations

right right falling earlier in in the order of operations this is seems like a necessary i don't want to say stepping stone but a piece of infrastructure to enable the the type of adoption and building on top of the lightning network that that many uh want to see come to to the lightning network but maybe what you're building at voltage and others building similar services is needs to be done first before all that can happen right and like so it's there's a big kind of paradigm shift between like on-chain bitcoin and lightning to where like on-chain bitcoin it's pretty easy to develop on and use like you can have like an address and like nothing has to be online ever you can have like a browser extension that you know just has like like the

address like it's it's much easier to use in that way and running a bitcoin full node really isn't that hard either it's just it can be a little expensive with like the storage of it uh but like on-chain bitcoin is really not that difficult when you talk about lightning it's like a completely different paradigm because you have to have an always-on service it needs to be backed up your channel states need to be in order like there's a whole new dynamic of it um and it requires some serious infrastructure that is not really required like on on and on chain bitcoin so that's what that's what we're you know kind of offering is this way to um to to make that easier you know like when you're talking about large-scale need for infrastructure there has to there has to

be someone to offer that infrastructure um what what i what i really enjoy about you know the bitcoin um on a fundamental level is that people have people have the freedom to choose how they run their stuff so like you can be you can be a lightning user a bitcoin user and like you can keep all of your funds on coinbase all the time you have that right we don't recommend it but you have that right and then if you want to go hardcore you can run your own node and you can like keep everything in cold storage you can do your own thing like you you you have the ability to choose where you know in your traditional financial system you basically don't like you either keep cash under your mattress or you have to go to a bank account you have to you know do all these

other things um and so that's that's what i like about lightning and bitcoin is people can choose their you know their trust levels they have knobs that they can turn where okay i can keep like all of my bitcoin like in cold storage at home but then like i can use like this hosting provider you know for my lightning network node that you know is my you know access into the lightning network um and people just have the ability to turn those levers which is not really present in the traditional financial system and that's what i really enjoy about you know bitcoin too is people have the ability to choose how self-sovereign and how uh how they manage their money and there's a lot of levers you can you know you can move in in when you're dealing with

bitcoin and lightning yeah optionality is huge yeah so to sustain bitcoin survivability to ensure that it can survive into perpetuity i guess it's just making sure that the optionality still exists when the options become fewer and fewer that's when bitcoin becomes less of what it's striving to be right exactly and then i mean going back to the sensor ability and stuff like you you you have the ability to opt out essentially it's like you can you know you see your platform censoring more and more or monitoring more and more okay then you can you know move move to a different provider i think that's what keeps uh us as like a hosting provider honest is like people have like the ability to move like you know they aren't they aren't necessarily tied to us

like they can go run their own node there's not like you know there's it keeps us honest and it keeps us like driving to create like the best product possible because people do have that optionality to go do something else yeah and i guess speaking of optionality from a cloud provider perspective just in general you've spent a lot of time in the cloud computing space it seems like what is the current landscape of the cloud computing industry obviously aws is massive uh do you do you see that industry getting more centralized or are there any competitors coming to four are people starting to realize the power that aws has and diversifying away from it i'm pretty ignorant so yeah i mean it's um it it's definitely massive i think aws was like 67 of

like amazon's revenue so it's like for amazon it's just massive um i so the people people have like kind of mixed feelings about cloud in that way but so ultimately people think that you know if you run in AWS they're like they have access to everything and they monitor you you know like crazy which is like just not true especially when you use like encryption like we do to where like things that are passing across the wire they can't even see um but I think they're the the three major providers I'll say are like AWS Google and Azure Microsoft um and they they there's quite a big split between the three and i think it'll probably stay that way i think that there's um you know some of the other solutions like digital ocean or some of those smaller providers

which are still competitive for sure um i think that those i think it'll probably stay that way for a while i don't think that there will be much more consolidation than has already happened um but i think the drive to cloud is just going to be greater and greater um i think that's evident i think i just saw an article this morning that like capital one is going like 100 cloud um and So I think it's definitely something that is going to happen. And I think, frankly, people like Amazon and any of the cloud providers, they make so much money just literally reselling servers. I think that they kind of have an incentive to, within the realm of possibility,

act in good faith as well because, again, we have the optionality to move. um and they're they're just making so much money on just literally ruling servers that would be a huge revenue hit to like to piss a lot of people off i guess um that being said like there's still the whole risk of like them like you know shutting off your servers randomly and stuff like that but i mean it's it's i think that's a pretty you got to be doing something you know pretty horrible and pretty like uh against their terms of service to like to have that happen and you know we we aren't doing that and it's i mean it's easy to avoid as long as you're not their their terms of service is pretty you know cut and dry what if bitcoin gets in the

terms of service you can't run a bitcoin now you can't yeah you can't do mining on uh on aws which is fair i mean that's a pretty that's i don't know that makes sense yeah now it's like core devs like leb almanco he thinks a lot about the peer-to-peer and the isp centralization specifically um it's just interesting to have these debates that a lot of people like have a weird perception of what the cloud is uh and a lot of misconceptions about what it is so i guess like what are some like the the biggest misconceptions that you see out there that like it touted a lot yeah i mean i think kind of like i just mentioned the biggest misconception is like if it's in the cloud like they automatically have access to it they can see

everything that's going on stuff like that but like that's it that that's possible but if you do if you take the right measures like we you know we can make that not possible through things like encryption um and that's that's essentially how you know we do it is everything is encrypted in transit at rest you know all the time so if a if an aws engineer got into our server and started poking around i mean they can't they can't get anything there's nothing there of substance to you know to pull out of the server there's nothing on disk like a macaroon or something uh so i think that's one of the probably biggest misconceptions is you know they they own you put in the cloud and they own it which is like not true like from a you know legal standpoint like

even in amazon's you know in terms of service they don't own what you put up there um and then when you do things like encryption you know like even if they took a whole copy of your server it's like you use encryption that you know the keys aren't you know you don't give them access to the keys and you know they can't do anything about it um so i would say that's probably one of the biggest misconceptions is you know the the who who has control of what and how it's owned um in the cloud yeah yeah everybody just assumes that google and amazon are able to just feed all this data and hold it on their end i assume that but the way you explain the the the encryption protection makes a lot of sense though so yeah and it like it's i guess important to point out

The difference between literally running your own stuff on a cloud compared to using Gmail or something where that's their service and what they do on the back end, we don't know. When you're running your own stuff, it's literally your own server and things like that on the clouds. Encrypt everything. I mean, you don't put the key right beside the encrypted data. You're good.

Yeah, yeah. Very good point. We're learning a lot here. on tales from the crypt this will be aimed to do graham thank you for educating us what i'm here for what uh what are you most excited i mean obviously outside of what you're building we've talked about sphinx gaming a bit like what are you most optimistic for bullish for on the lightning network particularly so i think uh i definitely think you know just it growing i think okay well i'll say one for is like lightning pool which i know i listened to

your episode with ryan gentry on for a while um i think things like that are going to be really really interesting where you can i again i don't i don't know what other term to use besides like lefi like we'll we'll have to like we need it we need a new term if we're not going to use that so just use it just use it just let matt be angry in the corner yeah no i'm already scared of like matt like coming popping up in this um and yelling at me uh but when you when you start thinking about like things like that like you know the more financial side of it that gets me really excited too um being able to like you know earn interest on your bitcoin by leasing it out like through channels i mean i think that's a really awesome idea um and i think things like the the

more finance side of it um is definitely going to evolve into more more ways to like earn interest on your bitcoin or uh you know do like what atomic finance is doing with like you know uh non-custodial loans um and betting uh you get into dlcs and all of that stuff i think the the financial applications uh of that are going to be going to start coming along you know pretty pretty heavily in you know the coming year or so um so i think that's probably the next step that i'm i'm super excited about and i'm watching is um a lot of those uh financial tools and then things like rgb and beyond you know where you're talking about like tokenizing things like on bitcoin um that that's really exciting too yeah it's crazy and it leads me back to an earlier

part of the conversation when you're saying like how early are we is this early internet uh and that's like a debate i have in my mind a lot it's obviously not happening as fast as i thought it was going to happen like 2013 so like chart like you think it's going to happen really fast and it happens a lot slower than you think it's going to take a lot longer but it actually happens like quicker than than you think after you it doesn't happen as fast as you thought it was going to happen the point i'm trying to make here is like i think fundamentals are getting to a spot where the ability to build particularly on lightning uh is going to to lead to like an explosion of innovation over the next three to five years that i don't want to say mainstream

but like close to mainstream would bring the bitcoin network and its applications close to mainstream just like using sphinx this week alone i was like holy shit like the fact that they have podcast player in it and people can just send a hundred sets in the middle that's pretty revolutionary yeah i think yeah i think it's it's it's easy to like kind of look back and be like man like this is like moving slower than i thought but i mean then you kind of got to look at things like sphinx and whatnot and it's like wow like this is actually like there is really cool things being built to have like you know real world use that you know people are using today um so i mean it's it's yeah it's a battle that i have in my head too sometimes of like how like are we moving

like is this moving fast is this moving too fast is are we you know not moving fast enough and i think that's something that like is also a testament to like the difference between like lightning and bitcoin and like ethereum is like we we are we are intentionally i think moving slower in bitcoin because we're like making sure like things are right and like really safe before like taking the next step um and i think that's kind of the difference in like ethereum's like you know all of the things going on in ethereum is like well they kind of like yellowed it and like just went with it and it's like here's the thing like you know we didn't have time to audit it but like put a million dollars into it where we're like enlightening is like okay we're gonna

like we're gonna release this we're gonna limit your channels to like make sure that like things are good for a while and then like then we're gonna like bump it up and like you know we're i think the the the build speed is completely dependent on what you want to achieve like you know a quick like tool that is you know that you want to get out today or like are you building for like the future of like using it like on a global scale that is going to last for like eternity um and i think that's that's the difference that's the trade-off you really got to consider when you're thinking about timelines is like what what are you building for are you building for like the next two years are you building for the next like 200 years

seven generation thinking baby bring it to lightning network development it's uh exactly right it's crazy seeing the short-term trade-off of like let's yolo build it uh blowing up in people's faces again again like we saw this week with the geth bug yeah it's still not fully disclosed and we don't really know what happened but we do know that uh everybody was forced to update to the latest version of geth at the full node consensus level on ethereum uh which is not what you want to see and it could be potentially a testament to the fact that they they yolo this stuff right right and that's i mean i that that's that's something i appreciate about bitcoin

and lightning network is that we you know we aren't yoloing things we are thinking you know long term of like okay how do we build this to like protect users and like you know give them control and make sure that this is like going to work you know at a at a huge scale um which i think things like rgb and lightning are made for is that you know we don't like we want to touch like the chain as little as possible and like do as much as we can like you know off chain and uh building for scalability and like in the long term i think is going to be is it it inherently makes the process longer but it's it's like it's important like it's something that we have to do it's worth something worth doing it's worth doing right and taking your

time right exactly and yeah it'll be interesting to see how quickly lightning pool gets traction if it does yet to be a foregone conclusion seems very very much like a good idea to me especially when you consider the alternatives like if you're able to put your bitcoin up on lightning pool just to distill it down to its most basic form and return get a yield on that bitcoin in a non-custodial fashion like when you if you can build out a ui and ux is comparable to a block fi like why would you ever take the custodial i shouldn't pick on block fi but like a custodial um interest bearing savings account why would you take that trade off of it being custodial and then like i don't even think they'd be able to compete on interest due to the fact that they're centralized and the point

i'm trying to get here though is like if lightning pool is successful it will bring liquidity which will bring utility to the lightning network as well and i think you'll see a sort of domino effect of of building and usage and uh things getting tested and more secure uh i guess it's a chicken and egg problem you need the liquidity to sort of incite use and that discovers pain points and then flushes over those pain points yeah and that's what like when i get back from this little trip i'm on i'm gonna like try really hard to get set up a lightning pool and start start selling some liquidity just to see what it's like i think i mean i think it's a it's obviously a great idea for both sides like exactly what you're saying about like earning interest um

you have some bitcoin laying around i mean you know why not earn some interest on it and then And also from the onboarding perspective of new users, the way to create channels is like... I mean, I get the question a lot of like, okay, I have a node, where do I create channels to now? And it's like, well, what's your use case? What are you trying to do? Yada, yada, yada. And having just pool, just saying,

well, just put an ask out there for a bit and just try and just get matched. You don't even have to think about it. like just you get matched with someone and you know you get a channel and you know you go like there's uh i think it's going to be huge for onboarding too and just like finding the channels like we're i think there's a telegram group right now to like try and meet up with people to like open channels to like benefit each other and it's like well like that's like that's very archaic and i think pool is like scalable yeah i mean that's not going to work so i think i think pool

is going to be the way to, you know, to ease that pain. So is there a way you guys could integrate this for your users? Yes, we are actively looking into that. To do it the way we want to do it, there's a few features that are needed on the pool side, which I think it's like they're in their next minor release, I think they're planning on adding it in. But we're definitely looking at adding pool into ours

to make the onboarding easier to, you know, when you basically purchase a node on a platform, you get, you know, you get a channel with it kind of thing. That is certainly within the realm of possibility and that's something we're trying for. Yeah, is that even something you could put like in a package deal?

Like buy this three-month hosting plus we'll open X amount of channels with Y liquidity. Yeah. Y amount of sats. Interesting. Yeah, that's definitely something we're looking into, and I think that'll be a huge help for onboarding, like I said,

of just, yeah, you get a note with the channel. When you think about Lightning and how you want to scale it, and really big use case, the managing channels and all of these things we have to do today, it should be abstracted. I think that once we get things like Autopilot working in a really nice way and things like pool, where

having to manage your channels and do all of this stuff just manually and being really cognizant of it will I think, if we do it right, you won't even have to think about it. Managing your node and doing all the stuff that you have to do today

will just be completely abstracted. But again, talking about the optionality, if you want to manage it, you can. But for most users, it's kind of backgrounded. yeah yeah now i'm like this has got me thinking like what does this do for routing services like voltage arguably increases it right like does it decentralize it though if you're talking about lightning pool no volt well a combination of pool and voltage like if

you were to partner with pool and buy liquidity on behalf or allow your users to buy liquidity via voltage but yeah no the pool order book would be filled with a bunch of different routing nodes so that wouldn't be it's not like you're buying centralized liquidity from the same routing node so yeah could arguably decentralize routing yeah yeah i think pool inherently um kind of spreads the routing around better so it's not like everyone has a channel open to like you know the five biggest nodes on the network it it spreads it out more so it's you know more of that distributed layout of the routing. And then for Voltage specifically, we don't have a central hub

that all nodes connect to. The nodes are their own thing. So there's not a central routing node in Voltage right now that everyone goes through. So when we hook up Voltage nodes with Lightning Pool, I think it'll be very distributed and that you get your channels from Pool. And from what I understand, pool has like some ways of like, you know,

making sure that the, the graph is distributed and it was not like, it's not only opening channels to like, you know, open node or someone. Yeah. Yeah. This is incredible.

Um, yeah. Future is break Ram. It is. I mean, we're, we're, so we're,

we're ultimately like, we're gonna get to a point where like man obviously managing a node is like you know dead simple and you don't have to like do hardly anything but so like so we're also going to get to a point where like i i think having like a remote always on node is going to be like a necessity because you think about you know scaling out lightning and like things with like sphinx sphinx and everything your your node is like your entry point into like into sphinx or whatever and the more this more services hook on to that like the more important having like an always on node will be um so when you think like if you have an always on node like you can share channels

across like you know any device you don't have to like open channels on like your desktop wallet and then duplicate the channel from like your mobile wallet your channels are in like one place and you can use like the jewel browser extension to like you know trade on ellen markets use the same node to like communicate on Sphinx. It all goes, you know, it's all one entity, essentially, and then you don't have like the vendor tie down of software. If you have a remote always on node, you can use that one day. And if that pushes out an update you don't like, okay, start using Zeus. Like you completely have the option to choose, you know, what software is you use and what tools you use. And you don't have to do like kind of tricks and weird things about like, being like,

turning on like the node when you have a payment coming in or things like that like phoenix is doing um i think those are cool but like it's realistically thinking that like how is that going to scale and then you're kind of at the mercy of like the os to like allow you to do that and so if you have like a remote always on node i mean you can receive and send payments like you know whenever you can like receive messages like on sphinx you know whenever it's i think as we as the lightning network progresses and more and more people start hooking on to nodes like sphinx is doing a remote always on node is going to be like necessary it's like your your internet identity you know when you're thinking about like lsat and like the you know the auth of it you're

having a node is going to be like a very important thing it's going to be like one of those things where it's like i mean it's your online identity it's your access point into sphinx or you know lm markets or whatever river you know all of these things will i think ultimately be able to tie back into you know a lightning network node and um it's going to be your entry point to the internet and a digital passport if you will yeah people describe it that stuff gets like mind-blowing when you think about lsat ln url auth like mind-blowing being able to create many different basically usernames via public keys they're assigned with one private key

representing the password yeah we can't even fathom the type of applications that are going to be built out of the basics that the primitives if you will created by these types of use cases and applications

one question I have yeah go ahead no I was going to go down a different path we'll i'll let you finish no go down that path and then i'll ask my questions like if you got something related to that that train of thought let's roll well okay so i was so i was going to expand on like like the difference like i mean obviously i'm biased and like how you should run your node everyone should run on voltage because like that's the greatest thing ever right but um they're like when you're thinking about running like nodes at home like the one

one thing people always like forget about is like using like power backups and like that's probably like the most important thing like when you look at all of these like node guides of like how to set them up at home like no one has a power backup on it but like i have seen so many github issues and like people in like the slack channels about hey like my cat tripped over the power cord or like my power went out and i don't have a power backup and like then they're screwed i mean they're not if they have a channel backup they're you know they're they have to restart but they're okay but they're like there's there's problems with running your node at home that uh i don't think people realize when you talk about like you know power failures like that is like a big deal for

your node because that will you could corrupt your database and then you're kind of sol you have to use like a static channel backup which um force closes all your channels but you know you can regain your funds at least um and then the fact that like you know i think the raspberry pi is probably like the number one you know probably the only realistic way to run a note at home like it's a raspberry pi is like a almost like a toy computer made for like you know learning how to code and like uh it was made to be as cheap as possible to be a very good entry point into uh learning how to code and using you know using linux and things like that and so when you think about like running bitcoin core lnd or all of these like you know kind of intensive processes

on like the cheapest hardware possible i mean i don't i don't i wouldn't do it and i i think that it's something that people need to really think about and running like and i'm not saying that people shouldn't run those at home i'm all about you know decentralizing the network and running your own nodes i think you just need to really think about how you're doing it and like have like don't use hard disk drives use like uh solid state use power backups um use good power cords like you can if you have a cheap power cord like that can under um not give your your note enough power you there's just there's a lot to think about that people really need to be cognizant of when like doing these like raspberry pi builds um that is like i think it's go ahead

i just think it's something that's overlooked like across you know when people are setting up these at home like i think again people should totally do that but like you need to be aware of like what is required and like this isn't like if you're using your note in any kind of serious manner like it's not something that you just kind of set and forget and put it on this cheap hardware and like you know leave it alone you got to really be cognizant of like fail like you have a disaster recovery scenarios and like what happens when the the usb connector on the raspberry pi board you know gets loose like things like that that people don't think about yeah i agree and that's actually pretty much related to what i was going to ask you before we went down this

this train of thought it was so for the uncle jim at home who does want to run this raspi node is there a way to like pair that node with voltage as like a backup or vice versa so not not really so kind of kind of yes and no like how like you with the lightning network you only can have like one node on at a time there's not like um you couldn't have two nodes with like the same public key like you know broadcasting to the network you're gonna have a bunch of problems if you do that um so i i haven't like i haven't thought about it a whole lot frankly but like you maybe maybe one day it would be possible to have like a backup node on um voltage that like your your node at home is like syncing files to it gets really complicated because you got to be

very careful about like channel states and stuff if you broadcast like an old state you know you risk losing all your funds so i don't see that being like it would probably take a lot of work to make sure it's like it's really right and a lot of testing um so i would i mean i wouldn't recommend that for anyone right now um and like we in voltage we give you the ability to like download all of your files from your node like you can do an export of literally like the whole lnd directory you know we give you everything um we don't necessarily recommend people like take those and run them at home just because of like the architecture differences between like our servers and your nodes at home like if there's like if you're using like a 32-bit you know

raspberry pi like it's not going to work and like you just there's a lot of risk involved and if you turn your node on at home while you're running it on voltage again you're going to have problems so we give you all of the files to like download you know for yourself but you just got to be very very careful about like not having two nose on at once and like make sure the architectures are the same so there's there's a lot of intricacies with it that are make it really complex i mean and maybe maybe down the road there is a solution there to have like you know an ha like backup node like in a cloud and have your one at home um that that is definitely something that you know we have been kind of thinking about but like as it stands today it's

it would be very difficult to do it in the right way yeah right because the short bits guys put out like a spec for a fail safe node or something like that earlier this year last year yeah so yeah so i read that post and we we have like we have a kind of a thing that's more like enterprising called like lightning clusters which is like very similar to that to where you have you basically have like two nodes um and one of them is basically off um and then they're syncing they either have um like excuse me channel states and like a remote database or they're like syncing files between the two um and then say one of them fails there's like a health check that notices that it fails and then turns on the other one and it has all that channel state um so we do the same

thing with that it's just that's like a it's i guess a more advanced setup um and that would be difficult to do like from an at home node to a remote node um it's easy when they're in the same same location and can uh basically use like the same like remote database okay that makes more sense yeah so it's hard to do that between a server in the cloud or a cloud server and in a device you have at home okay it's not it's not impossible it's just there there would be a lot there to get right especially from like a voltage perspective because we'd have to give like we'd have like i guess provision a database for that user and then give them like access to it it gets it gets really hairy and it gets like super technical to where it's like okay is this

worth it because it's so technically intensive to like set up at home it's like is there is it ultimately even a benefit yeah it's a ux hurdle yeah yeah interesting fascinating well graham i've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation uh i've learned a lot i'm more bullish on the lightning network than i was before this conversation started that's pretty hard to do considering i'm very bullish on the lightning network people are sleeping on the lightning network i think there's a lot of a lot of haters out there i agree i like that what the the thing that i that really drives me nuts is people that compare like lightning network capacity to like wrapped bitcoin or something like that and it's like it's just they're just totally not the same

thing at all and and the the other aspect of it is like you you don't know how much is really on the lightning network you and i could have a billion dollar channel between the two of us that's private and like no one would ever know about it and so when people talk about like i think like capacity on a lightning network and it being you know maybe they quote like quote subpar to like uh you know wrap bitcoin or any of those other things like it's just that to me that signals that you don't know what you're talking about like they're different things and it's impossible to know how much is really on the lightning network yeah i agree it's um and then you factor in the fact that like wrapped bitcoin is not on ethereum it's in a bitcoin multi-sig and

yeah you spun up a token to represent that bitcoin animal there's no bitcoin on ethereum right it's very disingenuous uh of a of an argument i would argue uh yeah and yeah the private channel stuff like you never know it's like the beauty of it too it's like how how big could this i want to call it a dark economy because you don't even have to make the assumption that people are doing things that others would deem are nefarious but just the dark matter economy that you don't know that's that's being facilitated via the private channel yeah structure lightning network right and there could be like you know two exchanges that have like a private channel that is just like you know loaded loaded like crazy and they're just you know they're they're doing something you

know between their two systems that um you know is managing liquidity or something and it could be you know several million dollars in in just like a one channel and like you know we don't know about it like and and that's what's great is like not everything is public in the lightning network which is you know you have you have the chain for that and then these this layer two and beyond is you know needs to be private like that yeah damn now you got me my mind running about potential revenue streams like if these exchanges are opening big private channels they may know the lightning network's infrastructure it's notorious that exchanges have a lot of bitcoin in cold storage what if they were to put some of that cold storage bitcoin into

like a lightning pool liquidity provider and just get more interest on that just another revenue industry and you could like and all the stuff we're talking about here like a lot of people like to talk about the closed loop bitcoin economy it seems like the the primitives are being laid in place to to make it actually happen i think the lightning pool giving bitcoin holders the ability to create a risk-free rate of return on their bitcoin is massive because it disincentivizes people to leave the the closed loop system yeah yeah and i think like i think just as it builds out like that'll it'll that will come and i think um like all of the you know ethereum tokens and things like that like that can that will that will be on bitcoin whatever is like valuable enough you

know that is necessary to be on bitcoin like with filecoin like we can do that like on bitcoin without a token like through the lightning network and having like pointers and have a decentralized like file system like it's there it's all of it is you know basically totally possible to be built on top of bitcoin and i think you know it's just a matter of time you know for people to to actually go and build it and and make the stuff yeah it's a matter of time before people start building on the infrastructure you're building out to to make a lot of this possible so thank you for doing the hard grunt work laying the the foundation that will make things in the future possible these these ideas that we're talking about yeah yeah for sure this is uh this is very exciting for us and

we're uh we're really excited about you know lightning network and how this is going to evolve and i think uh i think we're i think we're on the verge of like some massive growth of the lightning network through like people like us through sphinx and all of these you know things i think that the last several years have been you know very foundational work to like get the building blocks like super tight and now we're like we're we're i think we're at that point where we're going to really start ramping up like crazy. Hell yeah. Well, I wish you luck.

I'm excited to follow the developments of what's going on at Voltage and the adoption by users, enterprise, and individual around the world. Are there any parting thoughts, final thoughts, final messages you want to get out to the freaks out there? Just check us out. Our website's getvoltage.io.

You can get a lightning note through us for starting at $10 a month. Check us out. We offer a free trial, too, so create a node for free. Just try it out. Get on the Lightning Network. Get on Sphinx. We'll be hopefully adding a Sphinx integration here

really, really soon, so anyone that is running on Voltage will get access to Sphinx, too. Check us out. Go Lightning. Yeah. Go Lightning. If you're on Sphinx, check out the TFTC tribe. Yes.

Graham's a member there's a little over a dozen of us now I can't even say dozens but hopefully we'll get there yeah for sure thank you for taking some time to do this thank you for being flexible in your schedule I know we had to move this by a couple of days and then a couple of hours um so I really appreciate your flexibility and yeah I'm like again I want to echo the thank you for building out this critical infrastructure um which makes a lot of sense I like the way you guys are doing with everything encrypted and you don't have access to the macro and you can't really control anything in the

node. That's massive for making this a viable path forward from a scaling perspective. Yeah, yeah. This is like I said, this is something that we think is necessary and we want to do it in the most

user-centric way. Hell yeah. That's all we got this week, freaks. Peace and love. Bye-bye.