{ "episodeId": "SLP323", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "graham_krizek": { "name": "Graham Krizek", "role": "guest", "tag": "GRAHAM" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.45, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. Today we're talking about running hosted Bitcoin Lightning or BTC Pay nodes, and I'm talking with Graham Krizek. He's the founder and CEO of Voltage, a Bitcoin and Lightning node company. So we get into Lightning and why people choose to use cloud nodes, setting up as a merchant, easy deployment, the cost of running, as well as Flow and sidecar channels. This show is brought to you by swanbitcoin dot com, the easy way to accumulate Bitcoin. With Swan Bitcoin, you can wire in funds to purchase in a larger lump sum purchase, or you can set up a BSP, Bitcoin Savings Plan, automated recurring Bitcoin buying. And there's also a really cool calculator now on the front page of the website, so if you go to swanbitcoin dot com, you can punch in the numbers and see if you would put in a hundred dollars a week for five years, how much would you have put in, and how much would you have Now, the results will surprise you. Also, if you are a high net worth investor, if you are a high net worth investor and you need some more hands on guidance with a dedicated Bitcoin expert, go to swan private. I'm part of the team and I'm helping onboard high net worth individuals or businesses stack sats with a dedicated Bitcoin expert. For that, go to swanprivate dot com. Next up is brains dot com, that's brains with two eyes. Brains are a Bitcoin company through and through. They're working on some of the most unique and cutting edge projects in the mining industry Which is firmware for ASICs, they run Slashpool, one of the, well, the earliest mining pool, and their co-creator of Stratum v2, a next generation pool mining protocol. So with BrainOS Plus, this is aftermarket custom firmware you can install to stack more Sats with your ASICs. The main feature is auto-tuning, which is per chip auto-tuning, which optimizes your performance and you get more hash rate for your electricity bill. There's a range of models supported, so go and check out the website. And also by using this, you're suppor-- you Mining on slashpool, so this improves privacy and reduces bandwidth loads for miners in remote locations. The brains team are also hiring, so go and check them out if you're a Rust developer, systems programmer, or hardware architect. All of this is available on the website brains with two eyes dot com. Lend at HodlHodl is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin backed lending platform, and you can lend or borrow stablecoins globally and anonymously using Bitcoin as collateral. So if you need some fiat liquidity, you can put your bitcoins up as collateral and borrow to get some stablecoins. And And in doing so, you still hold one of three keys in that multisig throughout the whole deal. On the other hand, if you hold stablecoins, you can get a lot of interest out of this, so you can lend those out and define the terms and the APR for your deals. So if you're interested, go to sign up, the website is lend dot h o d l h o d l dot com, that's lend dot hoddlehoddle dot com. And now onto the show with Graham. Graham, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Hey, so, things are kinda crazy right now. Everything's, you know, we're in this crazy bull market. I just landed, literally just now, in El Salvador, and I'm here now for some Bitcoin conferences, and obviously we're gonna be talking about Lightning, and I'm sure you've got lots of things to add. so just for people who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the Lightning Network?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "03:20", "start": 200.32, "text": "Yeah, for sure. yeah, I'm, I'm glad you're there. I, I wish I could be in El Salvador as well, but, not able to make it unfortunately. but yeah, so, for me personally, so I've been in Bitcoin for, you know, for a long time, you know, kind of one of those, I wouldn't say early adopters, but, been around it for a long time. I always kind of kept it as a hobby, but always had, normie jobs along the way," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "03:43", "start": 222.61, "text": "it was the start of, late 2018, I really wanted to get more and more involved into Bitcoin and, and the general ecosystem, and I was really kind of looking at, alright, like what's, what's next on the path? What's next, for the, for Bitcoin in general, and obviously it was, it was the Lightning Network, it was still very early, but that was what everyone was kind of promising is gonna be this new mecca, for Bitcoin that's gonna bring all this adoption and all these people along the way" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "04:12", "start": 251.89, "text": "2018 really wasn't, I had some problems with it, mainly just like on like usability and things like that, which was kind of me having, not very good, foresight into what it could be, right? Like, what are, what are all of these like improvements and things going on to happen, with it. So, I kind of like said, \"Ah, that's cool, maybe I'll check on it a little bit later.\" kind of just kept going, doing, hacking on random things," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "04:36", "start": 276.08, "text": "and then at Like functionality, all of these things really started to get, fleshed out more, and all of my, my, the things that I didn't like about it were basically nonexistent anymore, and I started to look at as a very serious, thing that is going to be able to scale Bitcoin to, you know, the world. and so that's where I started to say, \"Okay, this is probably the time to start getting more serious about this and look at, you know, where, where some opportunities in the space.\"" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "05:09", "start": 309.09, "text": "and that's where, you know and kind of found it really still difficult to work with on the, operation side. You know, the protocol was like, was working if you knew what you were doing, but there's still a lot of operational overhead to it, and so that's where I found, I think there's a big opportunity to, help people in this, in this area, and that's why I started Voltage." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:31", "start": 331.3, "text": "Yeah, right. And so some of those problems, you mentioned that in the maybe earlier days it was a little harder to get started with your Lightning node or perhaps to route that larger payments. So small, ten sat, hundred and fifty sat payments would go through easily, but let's say once you started to try it in the early days, if you, if you were trying a hundred dollars or a few hundred dollars, then you started to get some issues, right? So what were some of the problems you saw in the early days versus what we see now?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "05:59", "start": 358.86, "text": "Yeah, it's, it's things like that, but then it was also like, before things like keysend and whatnot, you couldn't ever send a payment without needing an invoice first. So if I wanna give my brother ten dollars on the Lightning Network for his birthday, I have to go say, \"Hey, can you generate me an invoice first?\" And then, they'll give me an invoice and I'll pay it. That's kinda silly, right? So, that was a big like UX problem for me that, you know, ultimately got solved Would actually work. So that's another example of just some of those early things, along with routing and all, you know, the, the more protocol level things, but it was the-- there's some clunkiness in the UX, which has come a long way in terms of that. And like things with multipath payments, where you can split up a payment amongst many routes, helps deliverability immensely. So, a lot of those kind of weird, quirky UX things were what, were what I wasn't excited-- I, kind of, I don't Fixed before anyone would really start using it, and a, a lot of those things are at least fixed or there's at least plans on fixing them, like we have like a pretty good idea on how we're gonna attack that, you know, one problem" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:12", "start": 431.86, "text": "Excellent. And so it's really just been this whole journey of sub-- each different problem, some entrepreneur has come out or some developer has come out to try to fix that. And so I think that is where this whole idea of having nodes that are easier to run for the- Less super technical, less tech savvy, perhaps, although still somewhat tech savvy, but just not at that level, this idea came from, and I think that's perhaps part of what you're doing as well with Voltage. So, do you wanna just start and tell us a little bit about what Voltage is and what you guys are doing?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "07:50", "start": 469.59, "text": "Yeah, for sure. So, so Voltage is a Bitcoin infrastructure provider. So what we do is we host, Bitcoin nodes and Lightning nodes, we also host things like BTC Pay server. ThunderHub, some of these other, just, auxiliary tools around Lightning Network and Bitcoin as well. but really kind of our cornerstone product is Lightning Network node hosting. so through our platform, you're able to sign up, and provision a Lightning node for yourself in about two minutes. it's up and running, ready to go, very, very quickly. and you basically don't have to manage any of the underlying, tech stack with the node. You don't have to worry about the networking or the backups or, Your peers, all those things are pretty well handled for you, and so you're able to get up to speed much faster with, very little overhead. the recall, kind of going back to the reason I started it was," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "08:45", "start": 525.01, "text": "when I, when I first started looking at the light network, running nodes was super hard, they would crash all the time. figuring out how do you get connectivity out to the network when you're running at home compared to in the cloud, compared to all these other things, and, you know, what's best practices, how do you Super difficult, so that's why I started Voltage, is to make a really easy platform for people to just come online, click a few buttons, and have a Lightning node up and running. and that's what we have today, and we've also like expanded it to be more, business centric as well. So there's a lot of, larger companies that really, don't either have the technical expertise to know all the ins and outs of Lightning or don't wanna hire out a team dedicated for that, so we take on a lot of that burden for 'em, A lot of the complexities out for them. So just making it really, really easy for people to use Lightning is our, is really our objective here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:39", "start": 578.9, "text": "Gotcha. And so as an example, then you might be a merchant looking to set up a BTC Pay, and then so this is one way to do that. Now, how would-- As an example, let's say I wanna be a merchant, I'm maybe not super tech-savvy, but I'm, you know, interested to set up my BTC Pay. And so as an example, historically that merchant might have had to- Purchase like an out-of-the-box solution, like as in like a physical box to do it with, like say the nodal, or run it off their own node, or have technical competence, or perhaps they might have used, let's say, the Lunar node web deploy. That's kind of historically what they might have done. What would that look like now if they were to try to try to do that now with Voltage?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "10:21", "start": 621.05, "text": "Yeah, that's, that's, that's exactly right. And, what's kind of different about Voltage is we do, we kinda handhold you in a lot of the, the setup as well. So when you do like a Luna node deployment, you're still kinda like on your own once it's, like, once it's deployed, you're, it's like, alright, you, you go deal with it. we, we help you with the setup, a little bit more, and then we manage like the, the Bitcoin node and those things" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "10:48", "start": 648.35, "text": "It's a much more, hands-off experience for you, the customer, and so we're, we're able to really help you, get up and running faster. and then, we also help, we have, we have a great support team that can help you with any questions you have about integrating or, how you access your funds, because, you know, with our BTC Pay server, we don't have access to your funds, it's non-custodial, and that, you know, we just know the pub key and be able" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "11:18", "start": 677.97, "text": "Able to help customers figure out the ins and outs of integrating BTC Pay Server, and then how do they, also just kind of, manage, manage the funds and manage, connecting it into your whatever workflows you have for accepting payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:32", "start": 692.12, "text": "I see. And in the hosted node? Environment, right? So this idea is a hosted node service. What's the normal way, like, is the customer having to use terminal and SSH into that, or is it more like there's a web dashboard? Could you just tell us what does it look like, what can they expect to see?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "11:51", "start": 710.75, "text": "Yeah, so we have, we have our own dashboard that helps you, manage the node, so stopping, starting, updating, adjusting your settings, all of those kinds of checking logs, all those things, we have a dashboard for to help, On you, and then when you wanna connect into your node or actually use it, we expose the APIs for the node directly to you, so you're able to connect in from any, any wallet or any application, so ThunderHub, Zeus, Zap, you know, you name, name any of them, you're able to connect as long as it supports LND right now. We're working on adding other implementations, but, right now it's just LND. And so, you really have, you know, complete access as if it was running in, on your And you're able to just connect anything up to it, you can, you know, connect your own applications as well for, for integrating. and then even taking it a step further, something that's unique to our platform is we have, webhooks on our platform, so we're able to notify you when your node has an update or when your, when it got restarted so it can automatically unlock itself. so we have a few, unique pieces to our platform as well. we also have, IP restrictions so you can, set which" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "13:03", "start": 783.04, "text": "We've done a lot around security to make sure that it's, as robust as it can be for, you know, running, running a node in, on, you know, in the cloud." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:14", "start": 793.68, "text": "Gotcha. And can you give us an idea what kind of cost can we expect to see? Maybe give us a, a low end and a high end range that we could be talking about here to run a hosted node?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "13:24", "start": 803.73, "text": "Yeah, for sure. so our nodes start at $10 a month. those are, you know, very obviously, Just kind of individual focus, so they, they're backed by Neutrino, so, they're very kind of light, they're called a light node, and so those start at ten dollars a month, and they can go up to like, we have a professional node tier, which is a little bit more custom built for, a business's needs and exactly kind of what they need in terms of like transactions per second and uptime and all of these things, and those can get into like hundreds of dollars a month, but, overall, it's, Playing around with a lightning node, you know, instead of spending five hundred dollars on an at-home node, you wanna just kind of try out, \"How do I even like using a lightning node first?\" it's a very, very entry-level pricing to just try it out and then, you know, run it for a while, and if you ever wanna switch and go run a node in your home, you can do that. Like, that's, you know, that's fine. so very, very approachable pricing is what we're really aiming to, to create" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:24", "start": 864.27, "text": "I see. And one of the, I guess, historical things people had to think about when they were doing a hosted node was the hard drive space requirement for that VPS if they're doing a hosted node, because historically, and I think this is why many people opted for a pruned node setup, because the full blockchain, if you were to download that today, as we speak in November 2021, it's something like four hundred and thirty gigabytes, something in that range. And so that's quite an expensive cost for some- Somebody who's running that on a VPS. And so I guess that's where this kind of trade-off of having a pruned node and running like a Neutrino style, could you outline a little bit of your thoughts around that? Like, what's that range there in terms of hard drive space for, you know, the pruned user versus the, let's say, the full blockchain history user?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "15:14", "start": 914.28, "text": "Yeah, for sure. And even, we even have, nodes that are like the standard nodes that connect into a full Bitcoin node. but we have kind of a, we have a really advanced proprietary backend in how we run our Bitcoin nodes. So even when you're running with like a full Bitcoin node, it's, those are like thirty-two dollars a month, compared to if you were running a full Bitcoin node with Lightning node on your own hardware in the cloud or something, it'd probably be hundred, hundred and fifty bucks a month. so we're able to One user. and so it's, w-we're, we're really aiming to, you know, create a very robust platform that's also very cost effective, especially when you're comparing to doing, you know, a similar thing yourself. it could still be, when you're just running a Bitcoin node with, with a Lightning node or something, like you said, it can even, even with the prune node, it could be fifty bucks a month." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:05", "start": 964.92, "text": "I see, yeah. And so then, that also raises interesting questions as well. And of course, I understand it's a business, you have customers, you're trying to make it easy for them, but I guess it also raises that question around what level of trust? And of course, it's, it's choose your own level, right? You can pay the cheaper level and maybe you're placing a little bit more trust in Voltage, the company, to serve you the correct Bitcoin blockchain and not feed you, let's say, false blocks or false data versus obviously paying more and you now have," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:34", "start": 993.98, "text": "I You're really downloading the full Bitcoin blockchain, right?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "16:37", "start": 997.42, "text": "Yeah, for sure. There, there, there is like a, a trust trade-off with, you know, using any kind of hosted setup, so that, that absolutely exists, and I think it's just a matter of kind of what your own assurances are. I mean, even when you're running nodes at home, you do have to like do a little bit of trusting that, you know, the code that you're running on your, on your device wasn't tampered in the middle and like, you know On our platform is like you said, maybe even like a little bit of a step further, but it's, you know, even a step down from using like a fully custodial provider. So, there's always like a spectrum of trust, involved, and, you know, we're definitely, you know, some- I would say somewhere in the middle of that trust spectrum. and so it still giv- you know, we still give you, you are in control of your funds and your node and all of these things, but there's," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:34", "start": 1054.26, "text": "In fairness, that merchant, let's say they're a totally new merchant, they're, they're thinking in their mind, well, should I go to the likes of OpenNode as an example, right? And that would be more like a custodial Lightning solution. And I'm not, of, of course, not attacking OpenNode, I think, you know, they're great, and it's, it's kind of that spectrum of where, what are the options there? And I suppose, what you're trying to offer then is something in between that you're kind of not quite" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:04", "start": 1084.34, "text": "So, I, I'm curious as well, for that user who is, let's say they're new, they haven't really learned all the aspects of Lightning, channel management, managing the fees, all of this, how does it work if they wanna spin up a Lightning node with you guys in terms of channel management and all these things? Do they still do that themselves or is there some kind of automatic method there in the background?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "18:28", "start": 1107.75, "text": "Yeah, for sure. So, t-today it's been, like their responsibility to, like, you know, manage channels and do all those things. we provide, you know, a lot of kind of tools to make it easier. So we host like ThunderHub to make getting into your dashboard easier, where you don't have to necessarily download an application to connect in or something, you know, it's all native to the platform. So we do have been trying to make it easier, but today it has been like the user's responsibility. that said," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "18:57", "start": 1137.17, "text": "Flow, which is a, we, you know, we'll probably get into later, but it's a liquidity management solution. It, it's a, it's a thing to help you get channels. and so we're working on integrating that into the platform so when you create a node, you automatically get a channel provision for your node. same thing with being able to like use our Flow UI to just like kind of select your node, say, hey, how big of a channel do you want, and just, you know, have it pro- automatically provision a channel to your node." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "19:27", "start": 1167.23, "text": "Make it easier and easier, you know, we want to abstract a lot of these. It, it's a very, tightrope to walk of, you know, managing everything for the user, but then also, not having full control of their node, like we don't want to- The, the nodes that we run on our platform, we don't have any visibility into them. they're basically black boxes to us, like we don't know what their channels are, where their peers are, what funds they have on the node, we don't know anything about it. which is very intentional for us, we want it to be completely in the user's control and we don't have, you know, ability to spy on them or anything like that. So, it's a very tight rope to walk to have that as a, as an offering, but then also level of security and privacy, but also helping them onboard easier and, you know, maintain their channels and all this stuff, easier than, you know, just saying, \"Hey, you gotta deal with it yourself.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:21", "start": 1221.03, "text": "I see. Yeah. So it also does remind me of the conversation, even in the earlier days around LND autopilot. So that was, so people who aren't familiar, LND autopilot would basically try to find nodes, and it was kind of like a basic idea, but I think it seems that maybe the- The community, at least for now, isn't really relying on that kind of approach. The approach now is sort of more like you try to find manually good partners to peer with and open your channels with. And so then if you are a merchant trying to run your own Lightning node, part of that Learning journey is going to be figuring out who do you open a channel with and how do you try to get some inbound liquidity, because obviously as a merchant, you wanna sell, people need to be able to pay you, i-in order for that, you need inbound liquidity. So, I guess that's just an interesting, development. So, do you have any thoughts on, LND Autopilot or I believe, Zman had a similar idea, I think it's called CL Boss or any, any of those related ideas?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "21:22", "start": 1281.54, "text": "Yeah, no, I mean, I think those I think there's just still more development to do on it to make it kind of production ready. I think that it would, I think it would just make bad decisions. I don't think that there's just enough, like, in like, kind of decision engine to like, do, do well. I haven't looked at many of the other ones, but I think generally speaking, it's a good, it's a good idea, and that's, a, an end state that we will get to where, you know, channel management isn't Enough engineers to, to go solve all of those problems." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:59", "start": 1319.1, "text": "Yeah. And in the meantime, I think, and this reminds me of the panel we were on together at Tapcon, where Bosworth's answer on this question was actually more like specialization. So his answer was more like, \"Look, you might actually just...\" Have, there might be routing node services, or LSP, Lightning Service Providers, and you, the merchant user, who's maybe not super technical or super into Lightning, you just wanna use Lightning, you might just pair with that routing node operator, you might just open a channel with them and do it that way. So I think maybe that's- and then it's, you're putting it on them to be a specialist in knowing, okay, who do I open the channel with? How do I manage my channels? How do I manage my incoming liquidity versus my outbound? How do I balance those channels? All of these kinds of questions, managing my fee rate, et cetera." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "22:46", "start": 1365.52, "text": "Yeah, no, I, I, I completely agree, and I think that, you know, there's a lot of developments in that area, like trampoline routing and things like that that are," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "22:57", "start": 1376.51, "text": "really interesting to where, it, I And I think that, I think one, that, that's, that's a great idea of kind of having, you know, there's a lot of, say there's ten, you know, LSP providers that all do kind of that of handling routing for you, and you can, you know, maybe connect to two or three of them, and, you know, then that's all you have to do is just connect into these services that are essentially doing the routing for you in a way, so I, I, I think it's, a really interesting concept, and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:29", "start": 1408.88, "text": "I see, yeah. And so, I know, as you mentioned, you're working with LND, using LND under the hood. Now, I know Lightning Labs are, they've got their product Loop, and so the idea, just for listeners who aren't familiar, you can swap in and out of on-chain or on-chain using the Loop server. So is this something you would look at doing, or is it something more like you would actually have a, almost like a competing service, or how are you thinking about that?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "23:54", "start": 1434.48, "text": "Yeah, we, we would, we, we, we have Plans to do kind of any kind of competing service for that right now. I think that we would be, we're looking into, enabling our customers to use Loop more. So our customers can use Loop today, they just have to run like the Loop daemon or the Lightning terminal or something like themselves on their computer and just point it at their Voltage node, so they can use it today. but we're working on adding like the Lightning terminal onto the Voltage platform like natively, really soon. So once that's there, they'll be able to use Loop pool, you know So, we're, we're definitely looking on enabling a lot of those features, excuse me, features as we go, and just being able to tie into the greater, you know, Lightning ecosystem and being able to leverage a lot of those tools, much easier than, you know, than having to like run them yourself or, you know, figure out a way to do like these loop-ins and loop-outs, you know, in some other way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:52", "start": 1491.72, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. Because for some merchants, it's, it's like, it's enough to do their normal business, then Bitcoin stuff, unless they're like very committed to it themselves, it's, it's a big ask, so I can certainly understand that. So what's your journey been like supporting Bitcoin businesses or people who want to spin up hosted nodes? Like, have you, have you got any, things to share in terms of, not obviously doxing particular customers or whatever, but just obviously more like themes or things you're getting out of, working with them?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "25:26", "start": 1525.77, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's been, it's, it's been a, a really fun time, honestly. I mean, working with like a lot, a lot of Bitcoiners, 'cause that's kinda to date, a lot of our customers have been people that are like, you know, in the Bitcoin space, already knowledgeable about Bitcoin, and they kinda wanna take it to the next level with Lightning, they wanna do this, you know, the, the, the new, the new fancy way of doing payments with Bitcoin, through the Lightning Network. So it's been really great" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "25:55", "start": 1555.13, "text": "With Lightning, and so it's just been great working with those people, but now we're starting to see kind of this new wave of people that don't have a lot of Bitcoin knowledge, that are just, that just kind of know about it at a very, very high level, but haven't really used it in any serious way yet. And so those are, you know, people in like Central America with like, you know, the new El Salvador law and things like that, that are saying, \"Hey, you know, we need to start figuring out how are we gonna like incorporate Bitcoin into This, we have no idea how. And so being able to help them along their journeys, a very different one than people that are already into Bitcoin, but it's a very fun one as well, where we're kind of, helping these people that are starting kind of from, from ground zero almost, and teaching them how to, how to get onto Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. And what's, what's really, cool for me personally is, you know, one of the things that I see As we see Bitcoin evolving, I think more and more people are gonna be onboarded to Bitcoin through the Lightning Network, and then like the base layer, like layer one, is just this kind of thing that, is this, is this like lower level detail that you probably don't need to know much about. You're just gonna hang out in Lightning all the time. and that's kind of like becoming true where a lot of people are onboarding into Bitcoin through the Lightning Network and then learning about like the base layer and all these other things later on. and so I think that that" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "27:19", "start": 1638.86, "text": "More about the base layer and how that all works is, is a, is an afterthought almost." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:24", "start": 1643.65, "text": "Yeah, I see. And as a relatively young business, Voltage is probably the first onion layer is the more hardcore committed Bitcoin and Lightning users, and then obviously as you grow and over time, you'll start to have more and more newbie users who are like totally new and like, \"Oh, what's this Lightning thing? What's a channel?\" I guess you'll start to have that, and then maybe you'll have to actually spend more of your time actually teaching them about the Bitcoin and Lightning basics. Compared to now. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "27:52", "start": 1672.13, "text": "yeah, for sure. and that's, I mean, that's something we're kind of like preparing for now, like just doing some like education and stuff like that to, anticipate those, new entrants coming online, but I mean, we also have those today, so it's, something that we're definitely looking at is how are we going to teach all of these, you know, people how to use Lightning and how to use Bitcoin, and, you know, how do, how do we do it in a really good way?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "28:19", "start": 1698.86, "text": "Additionally, really, interesting and fun to work on is, okay, how do we educate these people on like, how do you, how to use Lightning? How do you, what's a channel? How do you use a node? All of this stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:28", "start": 1708.43, "text": "Yeah. And so that's probably the biggest obvious one for many people when they first use Lightning, they don't understand that they can't receive yet until they've got incoming liquidity. And so that's probably a common-- That's probably the common one that you see, I've, I see it when I'm talking to people," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "28:50", "start": 1729.92, "text": "Yeah, sure. So Flow is an easy way to buy channels for a node on the network, and it can be frankly any node. And so what we do is we leverage Lightning Labs' Pool product. and to give just a brief rundown on that, Pool is a, it's an auction service essentially on the Lightning Network where users can come together and, people that have, you know, say, spare Bitcoin laying around that is just kind of sitting there, they can offer to lease it out in Lightning channels. And so, new users or- Users, users in general, that need liquidity for their lightning node, are able to come to Pool and, you know, submit a bid to say, \"Hey, I, I need liquidity, I'm willing to pay this much to get liquidity open to my node,\" and then the auction service, in a non-custodial way, matches up, you know, the people, has them kind of do, do their agreements, and then, the seller opens a channel to the buyer. that's so, so it's an open, open it can be a little bit difficult to use from the buyer side because you have to create a lightning pool account, which requires you to lock up at least like a hundred thousand sats for, you know, maybe a few weeks, and then you also have to already have a channel established to open up that pool account. so it's kind of really difficult for people that don't really know what they're doing or new entrants. so what we did is we, created, an API that, essentially says, \"Hey, you can use our manage all the, the things on the backend for you, and you just say how much, like, how big of a channel you want, whether you want funds on your side or not, so you could have a dual funded channel, and then, how much you're willing to pay if you, if you wanna set that, or you can just do an auto, auto fee rate. And we will go and submit that order for you to the pool marketplace, and then just give you a ticket back, which is called a sidecar ticket, and then you can just go to your" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "30:49", "start": 1848.88, "text": "Built into all of the Umbrel Start Nines, all of those at-home node kits. so it's really, a way to easily buy channels from anyone on the network. It's not through any centralized provider or service, you could get it open to, you know, just average users on the network. and then, so it's a very easy way to buy channels both for yourself, but you could also use this as a way to buy channels for your users. So if you wanted to help your users get onboarded faster, you can still buy- These sidecar tickets and give them out to your users so they get the channels, to, to their node as well. So, it's a really easy way to get channels from just people out on the network." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:31", "start": 1890.68, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Are you looking to get started with Bitcoin mining? Compass Mining are making it easy. So over at Compass Mining, they've got a range of ways for you to get involved. You can either purchase a machine and have that sent to a facility that has been vetted by the team and then it will be turned on. You'll pay the hosting and receive SATs and you can select your mining pool also. On the other hand, if you're in the US, you can actually have that machine shipped to your home. And Compass Mining are also putting out all sorts of informative And posts from the mailing list, as well as audio content and spaces that they're hosting. So go and check them out. The website for that is compassmining dot io. If you're taking your security more seriously, don't forget to remove single points of failure, and with Unchained Capital, you can do that by creating a multi-signature vault. Now, if you bring two hardware wallets, you can do this for free on their website. You can set it up for free if you're willing to just move through the web interface on your own, and that's actually quite a simple process. More assistance, they have a concierge onboarding program which is really popular now, and so you can basically pay, have hardware wallets shipped to you, they'll set up a call with you and teach you how to do this, even if you've never held your Bitcoin private keys before. And remember, the important point here is to eliminate single points of failure, so when you have multi-signature, you're holding two keys and Unchain is holding one key in this example, and so this really helps you and can give, it can give you some peace of mind as well, especially as the number is going commerciorily. So if you're interested, go to Unchained dot com, select Concierge Onboarding Program, and use the code Livera for a discount. And finally, if you need a Bitcoin hardware wallet, my favorite is the Coldcard. You can get this at CoinKite dot com, and CoinKite are a long-standing player in the Bitcoin industry. They've been involved with Bitcoin hardware in recent years. The Coldcard is like a specialized device that only does Bitcoin transactions, and so it looks like a little calculator. It can store your private keys, it can generate your private Messages, and you can do that with a micro SD card going back and forth between the cold card and your computer, so you can use it easily with wallets like Specter, Sparrow, or Electrum as examples. So don't be scared, it's easy to learn if you're willing to put in the time and learn. There are guides available on the website, and in the process, you'll actually learn a little bit more about how Bitcoin works, which will help you in the long term anyway. So go to CoinKite dot com and use the code Livera to order your cold card. Back Gotcha. And so the important part as well is that it's not all like everyone just opens channels with the big, well-known Lightning users. Let's say everyone just opens a channel with Async or Bitrefill or Bitfinex, it's more like- The network is in this, through this auction, you're getting sent, you're getting your incoming liquidity from one of those other routing node operators, not necessarily one of the biggest ones." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "34:26", "start": 2066.36, "text": "Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's an important point. And like with Pool, they have kind of a, a tiering system where you can have like, kind of, they have like their whole like boss core where it's, there's like a higher tier and a lower tier, and you can, choose kind of which tier you want." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "34:43", "start": 2082.57, "text": "but with on it that are just kind of out there in the network, so you can get matched with some really good nodes that aren't those really, really large popular ones. And, for the sake of kind of, y-you're very likely not gonna have a good time connecting to those really big operators because everyone else is, you're just gonna be fighting for, you know, routes and all this, like it's gonna probably not be a very good choice to connect into these really big routing nodes. So this is a great way to decentralize the network more and being able to connect into ones that probabilities, when you're trying to make payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:18", "start": 2117.76, "text": "Yeah. And so a little bit of background for users and listeners out there, there is some risk even if you accept an incoming channel, because as an example, one of these big nodes might then have to think about the ex-additional load on their own servers. They might have to think about things like the channel reserve, or they might have to think about this idea of, I, I might try to route through this, this user, but if that user's not going to be reliable, have good uptime, be good at routing through So I get impacted as well. So it's sort of, there's all these reasons why some of the high-tier routing nodes almost, they don't wanna open up too many channels to the less reliable nodes because that might impact their own cost or their own, run, yeah, basically their own running costs, their own reliability, their own, ability to route. So that's kind of an interesting, I guess, aspect that people who are new to the Lightning Network might not really grasp these elements of it. and another one actually would be even if, let's say, you open channels up with users and they-- there's a lot of small HTLCs going through, then you might not actually be able to claim that back on chain if something, let's say, they later just go offline and they only routed very small payments through, you might have ended up paying all this on-chain fee, for like in vain, right?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "36:38", "start": 2197.58, "text": "Yeah, there's a, there's a large list of problems that you, you can experience doing, doing things like that or connecting to basically bad nodes on the network. and so that's where, it's, it's important to be connected to, to good nodes and to also, i-it's kind of like we said at the beginning of being able to, if you're just trying to, like, accept payments for your business or only do some small payments yourself, you probably don't wanna connect into, like, you know, a lot of, Really small channels, you'd probably have better reliability connecting to like one or two really large nodes, with a decent sized channel and have more success like that, and you're less prone to having a lot of those things happen that you just mentioned." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:18", "start": 2238.17, "text": "I see, yeah. So in terms of That user then, the idea is they can spin up their node and use Flow or get a sidecar channel coming with inbound liquidity, meaning they can now receive funds, and therefore sell their products or services on the Lightning Network. And so that makes it a bit easier for them. So in terms of achieving that, what's the current interface for that? Is that like API style or is that dashboard? What, what does that look like right now?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "37:47", "start": 2267.47, "text": "Yeah, so right now it's API only, and we kind of like- Launch as like a developer preview almost of just, API only, seeing how it works and just kinda work out a little bit of the kinks. but we'll have a UI, a dashboard coming really, really soon, probably by like the end of the month, I would even say. so we'll have a, a frontend coming soon where you can just kinda come to our website, enter in, like, you know, what size of channel you want, you can even add that you want some funds on your site so you're able to instantly send payments as well." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "38:21", "start": 2301.33, "text": "And so it makes, makes onboarding really, really easy. And, a, an important thing to note is that it's not only for like voltage nodes, you can use this for any nodes on the network. You can, if you just got a brand new Umbrel in your house and you need to get some connectivity to it, you could use it for that too. So, the possibilities are really pretty open in, you know, the, the way that you wanna use it to connect." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:43", "start": 2322.87, "text": "Yeah. So I'm also now thinking of the duration. So let's say that user uses Flow to get an incoming channel to them, how long, is that, Can you, just outline a little bit about the difference in the, you know, the short duration and longer duration channel inbound liquidity? Could you just explain a little bit on that?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "39:06", "start": 2345.57, "text": "Yeah, so, on Pool, they have, they-- right now they have a default lease duration of two thousand sixteen blocks, which is about two weeks. and so at the end of that two-- you, you buy channel for two weeks. At the end of that time, the other end can either choose to close it or not close it, it's really up to them. They could" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "39:28", "start": 2367.7, "text": "but then I think Lightning Labs is also coming out with like a two month lease as well, so you could buy a channel for longer too if you needed it for longer. So, there's only one duration right now, which is twenty sixteen blocks, but there are more coming online soon, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:43", "start": 2383.03, "text": "I see, yeah. And so the idea then is, as a merchant, you might have to then continually lease channels. If you are continually operating your business to receive on the Lightning Network. So, but I mean, that all comes down to the conversation around fees as well, because I think it's- It's also managing that expectation around what people think, because I think in the early days of Lightning, it was all, \"Oh, it's all one sat fee, it's, it's all free, you don't have to worry about it.\" But now it's more like, \"No, people actually need to be aware there is a cost to run these things. There's a cost for the routing node operator, and in turn, they're obviously gonna have to pass that on in terms of you, the end user, whether you are paying, in terms of like you're an end user just paying Set up for that too. So I think that's going to be interesting and just to see where the fees sort of level out at, let's say. do you have any reflections or thoughts on" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "40:40", "start": 2440.45, "text": "that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's becoming maybe a little bit of a hotter topic here recently about like fees on the Lightning Network and stuff, which I, I, I find it really interesting. I think that a lot of people have really good points. I'm kind of like, personally, sitting in the middle, just listening to everyone's arguments and," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "41:00", "start": 2460.4, "text": "Out there that think that you should, pay for payment attempts too, whether it goes through or not, you should always pay for attempts, which, you know, prevents spamming of people just kind of probing channels and just trying to do- Either malicious or just trying to get insights or something like that, which I think has validity. I think that there could be, you know, a, a, an argument to be had for that. but then it's also, like you said, you know, there's people that are- None. None of this is free for anyone, so inherently charging a fee to route payments through your node, I think, makes a lot of sense. You know, there's people that are, on the zero fee bandwagon where they think that all fees should be zero, and I think that, you know, I think that that gets hard because people, you know, like I said, there's people are, this is a, a cost to everyone, bandwidth, hardware, all of these things, you know, cost money. So, it's a, it's a very I, I'm really interested to see how it goes. I'm kind of like just listening to everyone's arguments, and I think that, one, one day there'll be a pretty good solution to it. but I think what's like really great about the Lightning Network is that, you know, when we're talking about charging fees for failed payments or something like that, we're not talking like charging five cents for a failed payment. I mean, it's like, like a one milli-satoshi, like it could be so, so small that it, you" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "42:25", "start": 2544.65, "text": "know, is really material cost, but it's enough to prevent spamming or something like that. So I think that that's something that people get really, upset about is, \"Well, I don't wanna pay for a failed payment.\" Well, it's like you're not paying a, a nominal amount of money for it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:39", "start": 2559.44, "text": "Yeah, I see. Yeah, that'll be interesting. Yeah, we'll get into some of that as well. I, I am curious as well whether you have any, yeah, do you have any ideas on where you see, I mean, we were talking about the fees aspect of it. Where would you say fees are right now in terms of, would you say something like zero point two percent, zero point three percent is sort of, let's say for the end user paying, the, let's say on, as an example, paying a hundred dollar payment on" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:09", "start": 2589.08, "text": "It's fair to say they might be paying something like twenty cents on that, or do you have a rough feeling of where that is or sense of that?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "43:16", "start": 2595.5, "text": "Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I have necessarily a, a hard feeling on that, and I haven't, I haven't honestly haven't paid much attention to like where fees are at now. I would say it's maybe even like, maybe a little higher than like, you know, twenty cents on a hundred dollars or something like that. I, i-again, it really depends on your route too. Like" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "43:40", "start": 2619.62, "text": "what can be maybe a little bit, unpredictable with the network is it just depends on your path and the fees that everyone sets on that path, whether it's, you know, really high or really low. so, and, and I think that that's kind of the state of the network I would say right now is it's very sporadic where some people have fees higher, some people have no fees at all, and it's all about, I think that that's the- There's a lot of people that are interested in the Lightning Network right now about like the fees and the economics to the Lightning Network of watching your channel get drained from one side to the other and saying, \"Hey, I can increase fees, you know, ten percent, and then it'll, you know, I'll collect more money and then it'll drain slower.\" And, you know, trying that out for a week and, you know, playing, playing around with the fee rates and how fast, you know, your channels are getting drained or funds are moving around. So I think there's a lot of" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "44:31", "start": 2670.75, "text": "Network a little bit sporadic in terms of fees right now, so it could-- it, it's kind of all over the place." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:36", "start": 2675.63, "text": "Yeah, right. And if you're, if they're trying to really overly optimize, as listeners might recall from my earlier episode with Jester and Tony from Amboss, we were talking about that idea that some users are- Changing their fee rates extremely quickly, and then that can also cause some issues, around the network. I haven't, I, I haven't" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "44:55", "start": 2694.93, "text": "listened to that, to that episode yet. I need to do that, but that, that has caused some significant problems on the network because of the, the gossip layer, like, how, for those that aren't really familiar, the Lightning Network uses a gossip, messaging protocol that basically whenever you update your fees or you create a new node or a new channel, it sends messages out to the greater network and everyone kind of relays those messages well, if you're updating your fees every five seconds or ten seconds, that's a lot of messages on the network, and it essentially just spams the whole network to where, no one really gets the important messages, they're getting just your stupid fee rate up-- updates that, that no one cares about. So doing that is actually really problematic too, but I think that, we, we learned that a few months ago that, that could be really problematic. I think some of the implementations added some safeguards to that as well, though." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:45", "start": 2745.14, "text": "I see. So maybe an Because they might rate limit the number of times that you change your fee rates, as an example, right? So maybe that's something, but I guess, and just the broader conversation around Lightning Network and where it's going and perhaps security considerations and some of these questions are starting to come up now as well. So as we were saying, there was that earlier concern, you noted around spamming or, or jamming. So I think this is, if you, if you, if listeners you wanna search, search channel jamming. So there's this idea that, and there's potentially fixing these things by either doing things like rate limiting or having some kind of reputational system or various ideas like that. Do you have any, thoughts on that or do you have any things that you think are likely as outcomes of, these attempts to stop jamming and therefore what that does to the network?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "46:37", "start": 2797.26, "text": "Yeah, I think that, I- I, I don't, I don't, I guess it's, it's one of those things I don't really have hard feelings about either. I think that it's one where I'm kind of like staying in my lane of, you know, my, my knowledge and I let, and I let those people that are like really into the channel jammy things like Yoast and, there's some other people, that are like, you know, really trying to solve that problem really, really, you know, efficiently. So I, I kind of stand back and let them do it It, it's one of those things that goes back to like the key send thing that where I was saying that, I didn't like the light network because you couldn't, send without an invoice. Well, this is another thing that's like, well, I don't, this doesn't sound great, but I have confidence that it's gonna be solved one day where this isn't an issue anymore, and it's just a matter of time for people to find that solution. So, I, I think it's one of those things that will get solved, and, you know" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:29", "start": 2849.32, "text": "Yeah, I s- I see. and I guess it is also starting to grow up as a network, and so it might also start to face some more security challenges or people trying to actually attack the network. I think maybe for the first few years of the Lightning Network's life it's, it's, it's had training wheels effectively, and nobody's really been actively trying to attack it, whereas in the earlier days, Bitcoin was just getting attacked all the time. And so I wonder, and this is something for all of us, right? Because you're, you're building a business, you, you know, with a big component of the Lightning Network, involved, and obviously I'm a Bitcoin and Lightning, you know, I'm, podcaster and I'm talking about it all the time. So we all have some, I'm wondering, do you have any thoughts on that in terms of are there other security things out there hiding or do, do you see that as a risk? do you have any thoughts on that?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "48:27", "start": 2907.28, "text": "Yeah, I think that, it's, it's something more and more people are being aware of, and I think that people are kind of waking up to the fact that the Lightning Network to date has been on training wheels almost, where there hasn't been a serious, you know, kind of correlated attack on the Lightning Network to really try and do some serious harm. so I think that people are, are starting to kind of realize that, and I think that there's a lot of work on the implementations as well to, to work on that. So, like, LND, I think the Lightning has like remote signing where, you know, you have a, can have a kind of a cold s- it's not quite cold storage, but a, a, a siloed node that has your private keys and you have like a more public-facing node that, can do more of the, the network, you know, communication. Some of the more sensitive things, to, to better protect it. I think that there, we still do have a long way to go. Like, like I said on, on our platform, we've added in a lot of security-centric features, specifically like, restricting your APIs to only allowed IP addresses. There's a lot of really prominent nodes out there, I'll say, that have their i- their API is open to the world, which is like, kind of security number one of don't do. so there's a lot of- there's a lot of things that are still being worked on, I would say, as far as the network goes, but I think that people are starting to wake up that, hey, you know, pe- people are starting to put serious money on Lightning Nodes as well to, that makes them, you know, a bigger attack vector, and then it also, is just something that you really need to start watching out for if you're one of those people that are doing that. So, I, I think people are really starting to wake up to the fact that this is becoming a That is like, you know, using the Lightning Network now. It's like, this is becoming real, and we need to take some serious precautions to make sure that this is secure." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:25", "start": 3024.64, "text": "Yeah. And as this network is- Being in some sense stress test, stress tested now by having a lot more businesses and users who are using it now. Obviously, I'm in El Salvador right now, and I'm, I haven't, been a, had the chance to go and spend with Lightning just yet, but, I'm definitely going to. and so of course, many users aren't using Chivo or custodial wallets, but of course, those businesses are using providers like the likes of Open Node or IBX Mercado or the government Chivo provider or Strike or things like this. So Everyone's having to, see how the Lightning Network is actually going to work at scale now, pretty soon. So with million-- there'll be literally millions of users, coming. so I think that's an interesting, thing to see how the network handles this Dramatic increase in users." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "51:17", "start": 3076.75, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I, I, I agree. I think that that's one, I think that's an important thing to note, excuse me, about the, the state of the Lightning Network in like Central America and things like that is it's primarily custodial right now, which is fine, but it's like, imagine when, you know, these more and more people are starting to use it in a non-custodial way, like I think it really, it's gonna alter the networks, you know, significantly," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "51:44", "start": 3103.51, "text": "Your, your, your, your users that you're servicing is going up, like, you know, significantly, where, you know, we're a- assuming more people follow in El Salvador's footsteps, you know, it's gonna be significant number of users on, on, on this thing, and so it's also your job to make sure you're doing the right thing security-wise, too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:04", "start": 3123.57, "text": "And from, let's say enterprise level or even just medium business size level, as people start to scale things up beyond just, let's say, the, the local corner shop sort of level of Lightning Network, then People will have to start thinking more seriously about things like backups, redundancy, and we're seeing things like various exchanges who might have a setup where they have like one node in front and another node behind, and they're, they're doing more complicated setups. So is that something that you might have to explore as well from a Voltage perspective if, let's say, you were to try and onboard a larger- Business who wants to take Lightning payment." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "52:42", "start": 3162.21, "text": "Yeah, yeah, for sure. that is always something that, you know, we're looking at and we're like adding into the platform. So the things like backups and, and, you know, the, like, like I said, like security, like, IP restrictions, things like that, it's all like native to the platform, so we handle all that for our clients. and when we think about, you know, larger customers, we do kind of like a custom solution. So if you need, you know," }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "53:09", "start": 3188.63, "text": "Those kinds of setups too. So we definitely do kind of create custom packages for those really large clients, and, there's, we're also, you know, keeping an eye out on all the implementations and their advancements with, you know, LND is doing a lot with like some new databases and stuff like that. So there's a lot going on in that space. I think that, you know, again, given, really the burst we've seen even the last six months, that a lot of these implementations are looking at, okay, how are we gonna run this in a very, you know, serious way outside of just some, some guy in his basement running a lightning node? We're kind of getting into much more serious deployments, and so how are we gonna service those people in a really, efficient, really, you know, robust way? and that's, you know, that's" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "53:54", "start": 3234.26, "text": "The implementations and watching what they're doing, and then we're able to surface up, kind of, you know, best practices and recommendations to our clients based on that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:03", "start": 3243.47, "text": "I see. Yeah. And so as you mentioned earlier, the current- Offering is LND, only the Lightning Labs, implementation of Lightning Network. What, w-what else would you look at next? Like, would you be looking at C-Lightning or Async or Rust Lightning sort of solutions? What sort of ideas are you looking at there?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "54:22", "start": 3261.95, "text": "Yeah, we're definitely looking at C-Lightning next. you know, we, we've, we want to add it to the platform. We're kind of like just a small team, and it's just, you know, a matter of man hours right now, but we definitely do want" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "54:37", "start": 3276.56, "text": "Of a building block, so it's not quite, you know, a full node in itself, you kind of gotta build it up, but really see Lightning would be, would be the next one that we're looking to add to the platform." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:48", "start": 3288.08, "text": "I see, yeah. And also curious if you've got any thoughts. I think some people have been mentioning, concerns, maybe not concerns, is it maybe a strong word, but some people have been mentioning perhaps payment reliability or perhaps, channels being shut down, on the Lightning Network or lots of messages being passed along the Lightning Network. Has that come into any of what you've seen or has, has that come across, has any of your customers come across that or maybe you've just come across it in terms of? Online discussion about Lightning Network?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "55:20", "start": 3320.0, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's kind of one of the, the fun parts about our job is I think we get a lot of visibility into a lot of different kind of areas and, and happenings in the network. and so w- w- you know, whenever there's, there's always like some, someone on the network that's like, \"Ah, their node's like having problems and all of their channels got closed to, you know, a bunch of these different people,\" and so that's, it's again kind of showing like the Weird bugs and whatnot. So those, those things, you know, definitely do happen, and I think that we're, you know, we, we work with our clients as well as like the open source, you know, projects to try and surface those bugs and figure out, you know, the best ways to handle them. so, you know, those things definitely do happen, but I think that they're, they're being worked on and we're trying to make it, so those, those kind of weird, weird bugs are happening less and less, which" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:17", "start": 3376.96, "text": "So looking out to Bitcoin or Lightning just generally, more broadly, do you have anything you're looking to see, whether that's at the protocol level or application-wise or maybe business-wise, what would you want to see out there?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "56:29", "start": 3389.48, "text": "Yeah, I mean, like, so we're-- there's a lot of things that we're working on, you know, behind the scenes that, we're really excited about. And there's, I, you know, I can't really go into detail on a lot of it, but we're really trying to create-- what, what, what we're trying to create is a full service platform, that kind of has things to service Lightning users, you know, just broadly. You know, whether it's, you know, things with like channel management or, you know, A lot of opportunity and there's a lot of things that need to be built around the greater, you know, network, to help people just get up and running and, get up and running faster and then also running in a really efficient way, when you think about, you know, people running applications outside of the- Cryptocurrency ecosystem at all, you know, there's a lot of great tools you can be up and running like super fast. Even, even in like Ethereum, you know, I'll say that I think that Ethereum has kind of had us like beat in like developer tooling and like getting these new developers on board and things like that. And so I think that there's a lot that we can do to help new people get on board and then also kind of cater to the developers and getting people to start writing applications around the Lightning Network that, you know, has just like there just hasn't been great That's something that, you know, we're working on, and I'm really excited about, is being able to usher in this new era of developers and this kind of, next level lightning deployments where Like we said, you know, today it's kind of been a little bit of the, you know, the, the early adopters, these people that are really into the network and really looking beyond that, and okay, how are we going to bring in new people and how do we make this a more robust network that, you know, maybe isn't, isn't where it's at today and, you know, just taking it to the next level." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:18", "start": 3497.55, "text": "Yeah, I see. And so- As I read you then, and from talk, talking to you, it seems to me like your main customers will be some developers who are looking to, like, spin up a lot of nodes for their lightning businesses or lightning products, and potentially merchants who wanna take lightning payment, And maybe, let's say if you're, if you're living, you're traveling around a lot and you need your Bitcoin node to be running, a-as a, as a VPS, 'cause you can't obviously travel with that Bitcoin node. Well, then maybe that kind of user might be, a typical-- that might be a, a typical customer as well. So- Is that, is that right or where else do you see your typical customers being? What kind of profiles do you see them as?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "59:00", "start": 3540.21, "text": "Yeah, yeah, we, like, we, we have a very, I think, wide kind of profile of customer, and that's kind of, that's kind of intentional with just, you know, how early the Lightning Network is. We wanna provide good solutions for kind of everyone, until, you know, while we're growing the network. So, you know, those like really kind of cheap entry level plans are great for people that are, like you You know, it's a, a great solution for them. and then it's also, great for if you wanted to, create like, donation page or you have an event or something and you wanna like accept lightning payments, but you don't wanna like dock to your own personal lightning node. You know, you can spin up a node on our platform for a week for your event, accept your donations, close the channels, and, and be done with it, just delete it entirely. So there's a, there's a lot of use cases for just, you know" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "59:54", "start": 3593.57, "text": "Right, that we're working with a lot of, people that are kind of creating lots of lightning nodes as well, like we, you know, work with Sphinx and Zion, the two, kind of social media, platforms that are built on lightning. So, you know, we provision thousands of lightning nodes for them, as well as, you know, people like we run nodes for like Amboss, so those people that are developing applications on top of the, on top of the lightning network to do insights or, you know, usability, Thunder Games is a good" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "01:00:23", "start": 3623.95, "text": "And then like we have some bigger customers that I'm, you know, not even probably allowed to name. So it's a very wide spectrum from just the individual that just needs a lightning node all the way up to like, you know, the bit-- mission critical deployments that, you know, you don't wanna run your business's shop on a Raspberry Pi in your home be-- because that doesn't make any sense. So, it's, it's a very wide range of customers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:45", "start": 3645.48, "text": "Yeah. One other question, so I guess slightly stepping away from the lightning aspect just for a bit, let's And do, I don't know, Electrum servers or other, like, not necessarily Lightning, but just have a Bitcoin hosted node, so Bitcoin Electrum server, maybe something, maybe CoinJoin aspects as well, that they just want that as an on always running node. Is that something you're exploring? Is that something you would offer as a service for people?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "01:01:13", "start": 3673.84, "text": "Yeah, we do like, so we do host like Bitcoin nodes, and we do do, you know, a handful of them. so we do do that, and if a customer needed something like Electrum server or, you know, whatever the services are, you know, we can kind of work with them to, to make sure it's, you know, installed and running. So, we do, we do work with those, those kinds of things, and we, we are definitely able to provide kind of custom solutions depending on, you know, the, the person's needs" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:39", "start": 3699.54, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. Well, that I was just thinking that could also be like, as another example, what if you had, Uncle Jim node, right? And you, it's, it's like an Electrum server, and you can spin that up, and then you can tell all your family and friends, \"Oh, hey, if you're a noob and you can't run your own thing, hey, here's mine. Connect to mine.\" So maybe that's a, that's like a, a product idea. but, But, yeah, so I think that's, th-those are probably the key points, and we're probably running up to time anyway. So, Graham, where can people find you online, and if you've got any other, final thoughts for listeners out there?" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "01:02:15", "start": 3735.51, "text": "Yeah, for sure. So, you can find me online, at, on Twitter, my handle's at g k r i z e k, and you can find Voltage at voltage cloud. you know, sign up, we have a free trial node where you can just come, you know, create a, a node for free for, for ten days or seven days. so come try it out and just, just check out the platform and, see what you think. happy to hear any and all feedback of, you know, whatever, whatever Watching, you know, our, our space in the future, we're definitely coming out with a, a lot of new products and we're working on a lot of really cool things that I think will, will help everyone, on the Lightning Network. So, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:55", "start": 3775.02, "text": "stay" }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "01:02:55", "start": 3775.22, "text": "tuned." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:56", "start": 3776.71, "text": "Fantastic, thank you Graham." }, { "speaker": "graham_krizek", "time": "01:02:58", "start": 3778.45, "text": "Yeah, thank you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:00", "start": 3780.21, "text": "Get the show notes at stephanlivera.com/three-two-three. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }