5 ms·

Anybody have a reliable, up-to-date pc build guide, for a full node? I find very fragmented information everywhere. I get that "most pc's can run Bitcoin core"

Anybody have a reliable, up-to-date pc build guide, for a full node? I find very fragmented information everywhere. I get that "most pc's can run Bitcoin core" but I'd like some more detailed information.

yuvadam 2y ago
Literally any PC can, I just finished a full initial sync, fully indexed, on a very lean box (Intel Pentium Silver, 16GB) in less than 24 hours. Assume ~700GB of disk space, and otherwise it's nothing. You can also run a pruned node if you have disk space limitations.
EGreg 2y ago
I thought Bitcoin and crypto is just fools gold, why get involved with blockchains and worst of all, proof of work?
- anonym29 2y ago
  I did not downvote you, but I want to respond to your question instead of taking the approach of weaponizing hn votes to simply suppress perspectives I disagree with, and I'd encourage my pro-crypto friends to do the same. We have to treat dissenters and critics with the same open-minded, good-faith, respectful dialogue we want them to offer us. I don't mean to suggest I'm not a biased partisan, but I will be a good-faith and respectful biased partisan. My views follow. Bitcoin is not fool's gold. Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless (third world citizens, political outcasts, people governments don't like are still able to use it without the government being able to cut them off), non-inflationary (inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon - the result of too many units of currency chasing too few goods and services, almost always a result of rampant currency debasement, not possible with bitcoin's hard-coded 21 million cap) universal (every country can trust it because no one country can control it) currency. The economic implications of these properties are incredibly powerful and difficult to overstate. This enables a framework for the working class to start saving in ways government cannot steal back from them through inflation. This enables trustless international trade settlement. This can prevent rising geopolitical tensions from currency wars over FIAT (backed by absolutely nothing, takes a a few key strokes to produce more) currency. Currently, it appears impossible to forge or fake Proof of Work, the way governments can forge and fake new currency into existence with a few keystrokes, which again, is the ultimate cause of inflation. Proof of Work is not without drawbacks, it is computationally expensive, but again, that's the point - it takes a ton of work to do all the SHA256 hashing to get hash results with dozens of leading zeroes - governments don't appear to be able to cheat at this yet. It's worth acknowledging in good faith that these computational costs have electrical load costs, which often do have carbon emitting costs, too. It's also worth acknowledging that there are alternative proposals to Proof of Work, such as Proof of Stake. While architecturally sound, PoS greatly simplifies and enables the rich to seize control of the whole system, and that would enable them to start stealing people's money. This is not theoretically impossible with Proof of Work, but Proof of Stake essentially streamlines that process, which is why a lot of folks like me distrust it. I'm not opposed to the idea of pondering other alternatives to proof of work, but they will be critically analyzed, and if people like me find issue with them as I do with PoS, there's a real good possibility that they'll keep preferring PoW like I do, too. Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system. Even if you seize control of the Bitcoin core wallet developer accounts, and start pushing major protocol changes, the Bitcoin community will most likely refuse to use your version, and keep the main chain intact. Bitcoin makes it fundamentally and systemically difficult to exercise force against the network to shove in changes that the actual users of Bitcoin do not want. The only way the network adopts changes is when the network likes them. Sometimes vocal minorities do play the intransigence card, and that's how we get forks like Bitcoin Cash, which anyone who wants to use is free to, but it's not Bitcoin, and the vocal minority interest hasn't fundamentally changed Bitcoin at all when this happens. Even bad actors who are secretly colluding in exercising force against the "general public" of bitcoin users don't get their way. If that's not the most tyranny-resistant form of an ethical, voluntary monetary system we can envision as a society, I don't know what is. Ultimately, this is all just my opinion, I don't claim to be some magic oracle of absolute truth, and I think we should be skeptical of anyone who says they are. I invite and accept all good-faith comments and criticism and want to open a dialogue for supporters, detractors, and neophytes alike. I hope we can all be kind, respectful, open-minded, and avoid name-calling and other childish gotchas.
  - kvirani 2y ago
    This is why I still come to HN. Thank you!
  - dartos 2y ago
    (I use bitcoin and crypto pretty interchangeably) > Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware. The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all rose tinted theory. In theory, bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. In reality it’s just another thing, akin to a collectible, that is bought and sold. Its value is based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what you can do with a bitcoin. In theory, bitcoin is government proof, in reality governments all over the world place restrictions on trading crypto. It’s so difficult to trade bitcoin for fiat without going through some kind of bank, that governments still have enough control as to make the “government proof” argument moot. Just look at the price of monero after being delisted from Coinbase in anticipation of US regulation. At worst, bitcoin (and crypto) is a greater fools game. You gain bitcoin with the only utility being that its price swings so much that you can sell it for a profit. At best, it’s just another payment system owned by very wealthy people. (Like ethereum) There’s a lot of theoretical benefits to decentralized currencies and governance free economies, but crypto (at least the cryptocurrencies we have today) embodies none of that and practically is a vehicle for gaming and scamming, as we’ve seen.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
      > Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools As of today the top 3 pools are 26%, 11%, 10%
      - throw0101a 2y ago
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  A full node doesn’t do mining Behind the asset and speculators and media focus on that, these chains are development environments with a different architecture than cloud services, and an attractive pricing model that cloud services cant compete with: pay to deploy once, unlimited free reads, and your customers pay to update the state of your app and pay to write to your storage, which you prepaid fully in the earlier deployment account abstraction and signin is already built for you, and transaction rails are already there and you dont need a payment processor’s terms of service to think about for your business model. its unlimited payments of unlimited size to any kind of business you launch. it also takes all the learnings of marketing funnels, and improves it: your customers already are there and want to pay to use your app. this is the most ideal funnel in web2.0 but is the default in web3 this is always going to attract developers and their entire audiences there is a big enough audience in the crypto economy already, for a long time. there is no need to convince anyone to come into it, just provide services to people already there based on frictions those people are already having a full node gives you data on what everyone is doing, for free, especially in the mempool, which includes activity that hasnt been written to the blockchain yet and might never be. this information can be indexed for your perusal better, or repackaged and sold to people that dont want to run a full node
- npoc 2y ago
  Gold itself is proof of work
anonym29 2y ago
https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node
ur-whale 2y ago
> I get that "most pc's can run Bitcoin core" Is that true though ? I find that it doesn't take much CPU or bandwidth to run a node, as long as you limit the number of incoming peers. Disk space (if you keep the full historical chain) is a bit more (three quarters of a T), but these days, that's fairly cheap.
- 3np 2y ago
  Still runs OK on Rpi4B with a USB SSD. If that's true I think we can say it's true for most PCs.
ynniv 2y ago
https://raspibolt.org https://raspibolt.org
Geee 2y ago
Any computer will do (eg. Raspberry Pi), but I think you'll need an SSD drive or the initial sync will take ages. It's possible to move it onto spinning disk after sync, and keep it up to date. Umbrel (https://umbrel.com https://umbrel.com) is an easy way to run a bitcoin node, along with other software you might want on your home network.
- xur17 2y ago
  This [0] seems to indicate that you can get away a hdd. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gito9r/how_long_it_would_take_to_synchronize_a_bitcoin/lvbmibl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gito9r/how_long_i...

yuvadam 2y ago

Literally any PC can, I just finished a full initial sync, fully indexed, on a very lean box (Intel Pentium Silver, 16GB) in less than 24 hours. Assume ~700GB of disk space, and otherwise it's nothing. You can also run a pruned node if you have disk space limitations.

EGreg 2y ago

I thought Bitcoin and crypto is just fools gold, why get involved with blockchains and worst of all, proof of work?

anonym29 2y ago
I did not downvote you, but I want to respond to your question instead of taking the approach of weaponizing hn votes to simply suppress perspectives I disagree with, and I'd encourage my pro-crypto friends to do the same. We have to treat dissenters and critics with the same open-minded, good-faith, respectful dialogue we want them to offer us. I don't mean to suggest I'm not a biased partisan, but I will be a good-faith and respectful biased partisan. My views follow. Bitcoin is not fool's gold. Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless (third world citizens, political outcasts, people governments don't like are still able to use it without the government being able to cut them off), non-inflationary (inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon - the result of too many units of currency chasing too few goods and services, almost always a result of rampant currency debasement, not possible with bitcoin's hard-coded 21 million cap) universal (every country can trust it because no one country can control it) currency. The economic implications of these properties are incredibly powerful and difficult to overstate. This enables a framework for the working class to start saving in ways government cannot steal back from them through inflation. This enables trustless international trade settlement. This can prevent rising geopolitical tensions from currency wars over FIAT (backed by absolutely nothing, takes a a few key strokes to produce more) currency. Currently, it appears impossible to forge or fake Proof of Work, the way governments can forge and fake new currency into existence with a few keystrokes, which again, is the ultimate cause of inflation. Proof of Work is not without drawbacks, it is computationally expensive, but again, that's the point - it takes a ton of work to do all the SHA256 hashing to get hash results with dozens of leading zeroes - governments don't appear to be able to cheat at this yet. It's worth acknowledging in good faith that these computational costs have electrical load costs, which often do have carbon emitting costs, too. It's also worth acknowledging that there are alternative proposals to Proof of Work, such as Proof of Stake. While architecturally sound, PoS greatly simplifies and enables the rich to seize control of the whole system, and that would enable them to start stealing people's money. This is not theoretically impossible with Proof of Work, but Proof of Stake essentially streamlines that process, which is why a lot of folks like me distrust it. I'm not opposed to the idea of pondering other alternatives to proof of work, but they will be critically analyzed, and if people like me find issue with them as I do with PoS, there's a real good possibility that they'll keep preferring PoW like I do, too. Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system. Even if you seize control of the Bitcoin core wallet developer accounts, and start pushing major protocol changes, the Bitcoin community will most likely refuse to use your version, and keep the main chain intact. Bitcoin makes it fundamentally and systemically difficult to exercise force against the network to shove in changes that the actual users of Bitcoin do not want. The only way the network adopts changes is when the network likes them. Sometimes vocal minorities do play the intransigence card, and that's how we get forks like Bitcoin Cash, which anyone who wants to use is free to, but it's not Bitcoin, and the vocal minority interest hasn't fundamentally changed Bitcoin at all when this happens. Even bad actors who are secretly colluding in exercising force against the "general public" of bitcoin users don't get their way. If that's not the most tyranny-resistant form of an ethical, voluntary monetary system we can envision as a society, I don't know what is. Ultimately, this is all just my opinion, I don't claim to be some magic oracle of absolute truth, and I think we should be skeptical of anyone who says they are. I invite and accept all good-faith comments and criticism and want to open a dialogue for supporters, detractors, and neophytes alike. I hope we can all be kind, respectful, open-minded, and avoid name-calling and other childish gotchas.
- kvirani 2y ago
  This is why I still come to HN. Thank you!
- dartos 2y ago
  (I use bitcoin and crypto pretty interchangeably) > Bitcoin is a truly decentralized, voluntarist system Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware. The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all rose tinted theory. In theory, bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. In reality it’s just another thing, akin to a collectible, that is bought and sold. Its value is based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what you can do with a bitcoin. In theory, bitcoin is government proof, in reality governments all over the world place restrictions on trading crypto. It’s so difficult to trade bitcoin for fiat without going through some kind of bank, that governments still have enough control as to make the “government proof” argument moot. Just look at the price of monero after being delisted from Coinbase in anticipation of US regulation. At worst, bitcoin (and crypto) is a greater fools game. You gain bitcoin with the only utility being that its price swings so much that you can sell it for a profit. At best, it’s just another payment system owned by very wealthy people. (Like ethereum) There’s a lot of theoretical benefits to decentralized currencies and governance free economies, but crypto (at least the cryptocurrencies we have today) embodies none of that and practically is a vehicle for gaming and scamming, as we’ve seen.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
    > Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin netwoek? https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools As of today the top 3 pools are 26%, 11%, 10%
    - throw0101a 2y ago
yieldcrv 2y ago
A full node doesn’t do mining Behind the asset and speculators and media focus on that, these chains are development environments with a different architecture than cloud services, and an attractive pricing model that cloud services cant compete with: pay to deploy once, unlimited free reads, and your customers pay to update the state of your app and pay to write to your storage, which you prepaid fully in the earlier deployment account abstraction and signin is already built for you, and transaction rails are already there and you dont need a payment processor’s terms of service to think about for your business model. its unlimited payments of unlimited size to any kind of business you launch. it also takes all the learnings of marketing funnels, and improves it: your customers already are there and want to pay to use your app. this is the most ideal funnel in web2.0 but is the default in web3 this is always going to attract developers and their entire audiences there is a big enough audience in the crypto economy already, for a long time. there is no need to convince anyone to come into it, just provide services to people already there based on frictions those people are already having a full node gives you data on what everyone is doing, for free, especially in the mempool, which includes activity that hasnt been written to the blockchain yet and might never be. this information can be indexed for your perusal better, or repackaged and sold to people that dont want to run a full node
npoc 2y ago
Gold itself is proof of work

anonym29 2y ago

https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node

ur-whale 2y ago

> I get that "most pc's can run Bitcoin core" Is that true though ? I find that it doesn't take much CPU or bandwidth to run a node, as long as you limit the number of incoming peers. Disk space (if you keep the full historical chain) is a bit more (three quarters of a T), but these days, that's fairly cheap.

3np 2y ago
Still runs OK on Rpi4B with a USB SSD. If that's true I think we can say it's true for most PCs.

ynniv 2y ago

https://raspibolt.org https://raspibolt.org

Geee 2y ago

Any computer will do (eg. Raspberry Pi), but I think you'll need an SSD drive or the initial sync will take ages. It's possible to move it onto spinning disk after sync, and keep it up to date. Umbrel (https://umbrel.com https://umbrel.com) is an easy way to run a bitcoin node, along with other software you might want on your home network.

xur17 2y ago
This [0] seems to indicate that you can get away a hdd. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gito9r/how_long_it_would_take_to_synchronize_a_bitcoin/lvbmibl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1gito9r/how_long_i...