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

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

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

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