It's been a few too many weeks since my last real update where I teased the imminent arrival of the Lightning to Hive service which will match the Hive to Lightning gateway lnd.v4v.app I already have running.
So what happened?
Development happened. For those of you who aren't developers (can I call myself a developer yet? I think so) I'll try to cast some light on this mysterious dark art.
I knew from the start I wanted to be able to have a simple link which any Hive front end can put in a front end and that will pop up a window which will show a QR Code and any of the mushrooming Bitcoin Lightning wallets can snap and send Sats direct to a Hive user.
I actually did get this working involving a 
The goal was a link like this one which will pop up a live QR code and let you send 3333 sats to me as Hive. And yes I know there is a problem with the page not showing the Hive or HBD value right now... anyone who wants to help me out and knows javascript, Vue and specifically the Quasar Framework get in touch!
The big deal
Just to remind you: receiving Lightning today involves having a Lightning node online 24/7 and able to producer a Lightning Invoice. There are ways to send unsolicited amounts of sats but these also involve having an online 24/7 presence to receive.
This is why it's so easy to receive Lightning as Hive because your Hive account is kept working 24/7 for you by the witnesses and the operators of all the various DAPPs you use.
What I changed
So this week I made a critical policy decision to move from using a Lightning Node I have at home running software called Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi. This served me very well developing and learning Lightning, but it's just not reliable enough. I just had a two day problem which appears to have been caused by a simultaneous failure of an external SSD case and an SD card and to figure that out I had to buy the correct HDMI cable so I could plug in my Pi and actually figure out what was wrong!
I'm now using a cloud Lightning service (called Voltage) so my node's hardware is properly online 24/7 and managed by other people. I still hold all the keys, they have no power to move my sats, but of course they can delete the node which wouldn't be good.
There is any way for me to recover funds but it's one heck of a tortuous series of hoops to jump through. One of the reasons I'm using Voltage is in the hope that they have better disaster recover capabilities than I do. This is one of my fundamental problems with Lightning's decentralisation not being as decentralised and trustless as it should be IF you don't want to build your own data center with redundant networks and backup power supplies!
Testers wanted
I'm not formally launching this yet but the link above does actually go to my development site which is working right now. If anyone really wants to test it, get in touch with me, leave a message here or on Telegram and I'll give you more details.
If you want to start experimenting with the API to generate Lightning payment invoices going to Hive accounts, also let me know. That's pretty much ready right now.
March 20th
This Sunday I hope to be participating in the SPK Network's Live claim drop show so look for me there to give a demo of what I'm working on.
And finally, as ever, thanks for all the support, it really means a great deal to me!
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