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Be your own bank! Self-host your Bitcoin full node with $200 or less
How to best configure multiple nodes (and the router) on the same home network?
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Concur. RaspiBlitz is nice configuration for the Pi. Have used RaspiBolt in the past too. They have an excellent hands on instructions to help you appreciate the nuts & bolts (bad pun) of what you are building. If you want a more powerful processor, and of course more $$, an Intel NUC running StartOS is a good option too. I run both.
I use a Intel NUC 13 and it works perfectly. As OS I run Start9 on it
No, it’s a dedicated Linux box - so you’ll typically need an intel NUC or similar. Although a Raspberry Pi can also work.
8th gen i5 (that's 4 generations old) with 16 GB RAM can do the job b with a decent SSD. That's it. 20 mbps internet is enough. That's hardly 'serious hardware. Heck there are even people staking on Pi4Bs not that it's recommended. A new NUC11i5, 32 GB RAM and a good 2TB SSD can be had for max $800. If you go used or wait for bargains, half that is possible.
Depends on what kind of Raspberry Pi. If you want to run a plug and play system like Umbrel, RaspiBlitz, MyNode, Star9 or similar I would recommend using a RPi 4 with at least 4Gb of RAM but more is better. You'll most likely need an SSD with a minimum of 1 Tb too as HDD's are just too slow for these setups. You can also look into buying a micro form factor pc like the Dell Optiplex, HP elite desk or a NUC, but that can get a little pricey if you buy it new. Used micro PC's however cost about as much as a new RPi 4+. If you just want to run bitcoin core then bitcoin.org only suggest 2Gb of RAM on any desktop running Linux, Mac OS or windows, but you can install core on the RaspiOS as well. https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#what-is-a-full-node
Well to run a node you do need a little bit of confidence with using the command line to get it set up and upgrade clients etc. If you aren't at all familiar with using Linux like that I'd strongly suggest just setting up a full node first. Then you don't have any assets at stake (pun intended) and can just get used to the process without worryingabout any consequences if you mess something up. As for hardware, ideally yes, you would want to host on a local machine. If that's not possible (e.g. if you don't have a reliable power supply or internet connection) then there are cloud hosting options available... but I don't know anything about them. The hardware demands are pretty minimal, the most expensive component will be a 2tb SSD, for the actual computer an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 is fine if you overclock it, but they aren't easy to find at the moment so an old laptop or NUC is another option. For lots of guidance and discussions from people in similar positions to you I strongly recommend r/ethstaker.
I believe the pooling protocol makes all the difference for Chia since you could conceivably run a node on a NUC with around 100 GB allocated to farming (although your earnings would be miniscule). If your single plot wins your little NUC farm would make that block, not the pool. Attach 100 TiB of disks and your earnings go up proportionally. There has been a lot of FUD related to Chia for sure but most of it is overblown. Whether it will ultimately succeed is another question but the node count is still quite high at 100,000 or so. If you haven't already, do check it out a bit more closely. Sure it has some drawbacks, many of which are the same for all Crypto right now (hard to get the profitability equation to balance with high electricity cost and a general downturn in Crypto valuations).
>Regardless, reality is that a ton of blocks are censored already. Do this argument is not only incorrect, but non-existent. lol yeah some blocks are censored, and the transactions that don´t make it into the blocks of the censoring validators, are still being confirmed by all non-censoring validators anyways. So in conclusion, no one is being censored as long as there is nodes that don´t censor transactions. That´s how a decentralized network works. ​ >You are constantly bringing up already debunked topics to push your agenda. Dude, I didn´t bring up anything of all that bla bla I responded to in my last comment, it was... oh that was you, right. And what agenda do I have? lol look at my profile history rofl Ethereum, right, that´s my agenda. ​ >Let’s take a look at it costing money to stake ETH. Would you ever stake ETH if it provided negative returns? Probably not, with your stake also losing block space dominance it would over time become even less viable to continue doing so. So the “delegators” decrease and the strength of the “validators” increase. Increasing centralization. With current validator dominance and 32 eth entry fee, this is. Death spiral for ETH. While BTC this happens every year or two and it cuts along like it’s another day of doing business. To sum your logic up. Ethereum price falls, less people validate, bad! Bitcoin price falls, less people mine, good! Sure /s **Here comes the reality check:** The consequences of a price drop are the same, less people are incentivised to mine and validate. The difference between PoS and PoW is, maintenance costs for PoS are so ridiculously low that coins like Ethereum can drop 90% before anyone considers stopping to validate due to maintenance cost. While Bitcoin already passed that threshold at 24.000 USD. People are stopping to mine Bitcoin because maintenance costs are too high. And to follow up on your scenario: When ETH reaches that point for the validator, he can unstake his ETH and sell it (lets use the 100 USD mark, so he gets 3200 USD). He pays 130USD for electricity and reuses the Barebone for something else. When Bitcoin reaches the point where a miner has to stop mining, he has to pay a massive bill for electricity (24.000 USD per year for one single miner and the same kwh price as in my previous example) and his hardware becomes worthless. Bitcoin mining is expensive as hell and you are not better off when price drops at all. ​ >Now let’s look at the scenario where ETH is worth very little. The stranglehold decreases from the validator perspective but the security ETH touts from monetary premium is gone. Someone could come buy up enough eth to take over the staking supply. In BTC this can’t happen. I must remind you that BTC has been worth 10 cents, $250, $2500 and ,$25,000. At no point in time was BTC centralized due to mining being profitable/unprofitable. Bitcoin is decentralized as long as there is 3 parties mining. The same applies to Ethereum as well, so your last argument is just distracting, stop it with that nonsense. As if you could measure decentralization on a scale from 1-100.. lol **Here comes the reality check:** The lower ETH price falls, the cheaper the entry to validating becomes because your initial investment is in ETH itself. Resulting in an increase of **decentralization** of the network because more people that believe in ETH success get the financial opportunity to buy 32ETH. To sum up: A lower price triggers an **increase** in validators. With every price cycle, more people get into mining solo in Ethereum and less people need to mine in pools. The entry level for validating can also be adjusted from 32ETH to 3.2ETH for example to decrease the initial investment and increase the incentive for solo validating. The lower BTC price falls, the cheaper mining equipment becomes, but electricity requirements **stay at the same level**. While your initial investment in miners becomes cheaper, maintenance cost still stays at the same level so it just becomes a riskier calculation. Resulting in more miners dropping out than new miners coming in. That is what we see right now again as you mentioned yourself. The level of **centralization** increases. A lower price triggers a **decrease** of miners until mining difficulty has adjusted. With each price cycle, less individuals are mining solo in Bitcoin and more miners need to mine in pools. In Bitcoin you cannot do anything to decrease initial investment into mining. It only goes one way: It becomes more expensive to get in and to maintain mining every year. >Bribing a validator is much different than bribing a miner. Its different but what does that even prove? I have responded to this already above and won´t repeat myself. And these hypothetical scenarios are nonsensical to keep discussing forever. so lets move on to something we can actually check factually alright? Because > It would take me 10 pages to sit here and explain all the attack vectors that open up from it. exactly. It would take as long to list the attack vectors on Bitcoin, and there is a list as long describing attacks that have been attempted on all Bitcoin forks already. So whats the point to use this as an argument against another coin? "I could list many attack vectors!" ... well so could I, and I would have proof based on actual attacks which ones work for far more than you have for PoS. In both there is a theoretical risk for attacks. So lets get on with the next topic. >Coin isn’t tied to consensus. Doesn’t matter. BTC has actually been close to $0 and still provided decentralization. One thing has nothing to do with the other, whats the point here? In one you vote based on your hash rate. In the other you vote based on the amount of stake. Of course there is a consensus finding mechanism in both, its just different. What a dumb and easily refutable claim, seriously.... Stop wastin my time with this amateur stuff, ok? I don´t have all day to respond to every new claim you bring up here, are you trying to drown me in them? >Because those are the main validators that would “find out”. God, you haven´t even checked the status of validators in Ethereum, have you? That was another dumb claim that does not reflect reality. Together those 3 exchanges make not even 30% of all validators today, so how can they be "main validators" if they are baking such small bred? And stop spinning around the shorting argument already, or are you really not understanding the difference between running a 50 watt Intel NUC and a 5.500 watt ASIC? You don´t mine at all, do you? One of those theoretical maximalists, I see? ​ >You are finally providing some sort of sensible discussion. Unlike you I can back my claims, yes, instead of just hypothizing. ​ >BTC could be shorted to $0 and it would still provide decentralization. It was at $0 in its intact and was still “decentralized” and did what it intended to do. Crazy what history will show you. lol this is just dumb. Bitcoin does not provide decentralization. The existence of more than 2 participants in mining do. The same goes for Ethereum. But I explained this above. >Lastly, any new coin, let’s take TON for example, will start off PoW and convert to PoS. Now you are getting moronic. Please, get out, get some air, come back later, and start again. You: When Bitcoin gets to 0USD, its great for Bitcoin! When anything else gets to 0USD, its the death of the coin! Alright.
You are bringing up already debunked things and using them as facts. Either research and provide rebuttals based on new material that hasn’t been debunked or this conversation ends here. I do not have the time or patience to deal with someone I have to spoon feed and correct constantly with info that’s widely available. > That example is to show how the community and other miners can react to a situation where a part of a network decides to censor transactions on Ethereum. So a straw man then. Regardless, reality is that a ton of blocks are censored already. Do this argument is not only incorrect, but non-existent. > It doesn´t matter how long some bullshit has been taught and repeated on the internet, it doesn´t make the bullshit come true. I am pointing this out as it is a time period of dev discussion and theory you should go back and research. You are constantly bringing up already debunked topics to push your agenda. This is why people are getting frustrated debating with you. It’s akin to debating the math behind going to outer space and you arguing that the earth is flat so the math is wrong. No one wants to debate the entire premise all over again. It’s annoying. > eh? Any validator you bribe can simply by more ETH as well to increase his stake, what a nonsensical argument. This point was brought up as it’s one of the oldest ways of arguing pos vs PoW. It clearly shows you how you introduce more attack vectors by tying the asset itself to consensus (dangerous). The price of BTC does fuck all to consensus. At many times in BTC life span the cost to mine was more than the cyst if simply buying the token and yet the consensus method remained decentralized. Let’s take a look at it costing money to stake ETH. Would you ever stake ETH if it provided negative returns? Probably not, with your stake also losing block space dominance it would over time become even less viable to continue doing so. So the “delegators” decrease and the strength of the “validators” increase. Increasing centralization. With current validator dominance and 32 eth entry fee, this is. Death spiral for ETH. While BTC this happens every year or two and it cuts along like it’s another day of doing business. Now let’s look at the scenario where ETH is worth very little. The stranglehold decreases from the validator perspective but the security ETH touts from monetary premium is gone. Someone could come buy up enough eth to take over the staking supply. In BTC this can’t happen. I must remind you that BTC has been worth 10 cents, $250, $2500 and ,$25,000. At no point in time was BTC centralized due to mining being profitable/unprofitable. Bribery attacks are just one of the first few ways to simply show the cost of tying the asset to consensus. It would take me 10 pages to sit here and explain all the attack vectors that open up from it. You thinking bribery attacks are “weird” just shows me you have no understanding of how these consensus methods work and was a super simple concept to show you how you have missed even the basic discussions. One last thought experiment. If crypto didn’t exist, and you were to launch BTC or eth, what consensus method would you pick? I certainly wouldn’t take the consensus method that allows my chain to be taken over by a first mover with some cash. That would be sillly. I would launch by telling miners I have a chain that is secured by you guys. Not secured by the amount of cash I can back it with. > Of course you can bribe miners. We are not holy saints from fairytale land lol Give me enough money to make up for my expected losses plus an additional profit, and here we go! Which client should I run? Another complete misunderstanding of how this all works. Bribing a validator is much different than bribing a miner. Even if you meant pools, it would take an insane amount of money to bribe 51% of the hashrate, then you have to sustain that 51% costing even more as not only can new hardware come online to fight you, you also have to constantly keep your captured hash from simply moving away from you. You bribe a validator and you have them for life. In both instances you still need to deal with the nodes which one half will simply form away from you while the other half can only slash you if you act up and don’t have longest chain dominance. > Eh? You short the coin with the same effect, mining becomes more competitive, miners drop out because they earn less reward than what they pay for electricity. Coin isn’t tied to consensus. Doesn’t matter. BTC has actually been close to $0 and still provided decentralization. > LOL and good luck shorting an Ethereum validator until we notice something rofl. Ethereum has to go down to 100USD for electricity to become more expensive in one year than the reward a validator receives for his 32ETH stake. Calculate it, I will wait. Use an Intel NUC with a 15W TDP cpu for you calculation. So Binance, kraken and coinbase can come and save you by buying up the shorts? Sounds super decentralized to me! Because those are the main validators that would “find out”. > Wait, I will do it for you. Lets say the entire system needs 30W and electricity is… lets be generous… 0,50USD per kwh That´s 0.030kwhx24hx365daysx0.5USD/kwh = 131,40USD per year electricity cost. > A validator with 32ETH earns 1.1096 ETH per year in staking reward based on the current daily income of 0.00304 ETH. You are finally providing some sort of sensible discussion. Except it’s only because you are using outside economies for security of the consensus. Which is what BTC already does. PoS only proceed this when the asset is $100 USD. Which would tank the actual security of the consensus by making it so cheap to take over the chain. > ETH can be shorted to 10% of its current price and barely anyone would notice. > Short Bitcoin and see what happens. Hash rate is already dropping right now and the first miners have already gone bankrupt. BTC could be shorted to $0 and it would still provide decentralization. It was at $0 in its intact and was still “decentralized” and did what it intended to do. Crazy what history will show you. Lastly, any new coin, let’s take TON for example, will start off PoW and convert to PoS. Why? Because of the consensus being tied to the asset is dangerous when it’s dirt cheap. If the asset heads to 0 the chain is worthless in PoS. Much like how a Ponzi scheme works with the need to take in money (asset) to boost returns (security) to pay off previous investors.
>Ghash back in the day proves you wrong. Not only that, there have been ahandful of mining pools that either aren’t competitive with theirrewards, or were subject to MITM attacks. Which again, shows you arewrong because the miners left those pools in droves. oh wait, you are right, i read ops post again, he meant that miners leave the **pool**,not the **network**. Alright, my bad, that part of my response makes no sense then. >MEV is not a good thing just FYI That example is to show how the community and other miners can react to a situation where a part of a network decides to censor transactions on Ethereum. Well, and from here on I have to say, you started strong, but now your argumentation becomes really weird. >since this PoS/PoW discussion started back in 2016/17 It doesn´t matter how long some bullshit has been taught and repeated on the internet, it doesn´t make the bullshit come true. >and I sure as fuck can’t bribe miners as someone could just go out and buy more after taking my bribe. eh? Any validator you bribe can simply by more ETH as well to increase his stake, what a nonsensical argument. Of course you can bribe miners. We are not holy saints from fairytale land lol Give me enough money to make up for my expected losses plus an additional profit, and here we go! Which client should I run? >Additionally, I can’t short a physical miner. Eh? You short the coin with the same effect, mining becomes more competitive, miners drop out because they earn less reward than what they pay for electricity. LOL and good luck shorting an Ethereum validator until we notice something rofl. Ethereum has to go down to 2USD for electricity to become more expensive in one year than the reward a validator receives for his 32ETH stake. Calculate it, I will wait. Use an Intel NUC with a 15W TDP cpu for you calculation. Wait, I will do it for you. Lets say the entire system needs 30W and electricity is... lets be generous... 0,50USD per kwh That´s 0.030kwhx24hx365daysx0.5USD/kwh = 131,40USD per year electricity cost. A validator with 32ETH earns 1.1096 ETH per year in staking reward based on the current daily income of 0.00304 ETH. ETH can be shorted to 10% of its current price and barely anyone would notice. Short Bitcoin and see what happens. Hash rate is already dropping right now and the first miners have already gone bankrupt. So yeah, that argumentation makes no sense at all. >There’s just way more attacks Oh really? How many times was ETH contentiously attacked in the last five years, lets say since mid 2017, compared to Bitcoin? ;) I will wait. >the feasibility of ETH being a cryptoCURRENCY has diminished with the implementation of PoS. Based on what metric? sources please. What I see is gas prices going back to steady predictable levels like we haven´t seen them since 2017. >I can’t bribe the top walllet holders in BTC Is .... that why we have twitter whale bots that warn everyone when BTC whales move their coins? Yeah, that argument doesn´t reflect reality I am afraid. >just you chuckle fucks that think will ever be a currency I never claimed any of that, do you need some fresh air?
I didn't know my desktop could lift the weight of an entire server farm. An Ethereum validator or node is Intel NUC size or even Raspberry Pi. It's sitting there right before me, tucked between my speaker and monitor mount. Compare that to the massive ASIC farm you need to run to even have some weight in BTC mining. BTW nodes do not require 32ETH, validators do. You can run a node for free. That's the basic of a blockchain...
What about a last gen Intel NUC....250$ range
>Pure Proof of Stake is amazing because ANYONE can run a participation node and participate in consensus with only ONE ALGO. This is the only part of ALGO that has me down. I posted a while back on the official Algorand subreddit with a question about participation node system requirements. It appears that a node system that would be guaranteed to work anytime past the immediate future needs to be at least an Intel NUC-class system, or better. This means that running a node is past the "I have a single-board computer, a weekend of free time, and want to have some fun" to "I **want** to run a participation node, even if it costs me several hundred dollars today, and there is no guarantee of future reward." You can't make your system setup cost back from running an Algorand node, nor even the cost of electricity, because there are currently no rewards or fees allocated to node operators. I'd love to run a node to help decentralization of the network, but at this point, I'd be better served just spending that money on more ALGOs.
You can do a full bitcoin node on a Pi 3, you know. It doesn't even require a Pi 4. I just built a full node for bitcoin, lightning, electrum, and its own blockchain explorer on a Pi 4. I did buy a 1G SSD drive and it was super easy to configure, because Pi is very common and popular. You'll have to roll everything yourself on the NUC. But if you get a Pi: Pi 4: [https://raspibolt.org](https://raspibolt.org) Pi 3: [https://howchoo.com/bitcoin/run-bitcoin-full-node-raspberry-pi](https://howchoo.com/bitcoin/run-bitcoin-full-node-raspberry-pi) (bitcoin node only)
It’s not that strict. Just spin up a NUC and Dappnode. You can even use a Raspberry Pi if you want.
Not insane - a NUC, reliable power and internet, and 17.6 ETH for Rocketpool.
That will work. You should find a case for it. You connect your HDD to the NUC's on-board SATA controller. If it really has 8GB RAM, set dbcache to 6800 in bitcoin.conf, to make the initialization faster The CPU is an old Atom, as used in low-priced netbooks. It will take about 10 days to initialize the node. The HDD will be fine, but you'd save a few days initializing with a SSD. After initialization, a HDD is better anyway
Looks like an Intel NUC with Dappnode is the way to go. Will leave the Synology NAS for something else.
Yeah they're hard to come by! You could try an Intel NUC or just an old laptop.
With the price of RPi used intel NUC or laptop would be even better.
If anything, I’ve come to understand that nothing happens in this market for only one reason. So while what you state is likeliest main factor, there is also surely a portion - however small, that is fully transitioning from mining hardware to staking hardware. Furthermore, the largest miners are arguably the most impactful. Given they have had years to prepare and collect multiples of 32 ETH hundreds to thousands of times over? It’s hard to imagine everyone just immediately transferred all of it to fiat without building a surplus to prepare for this change. In the perspective of power usage, they would be making out quite well. Isn’t it that staking reduces power consumption by at least 95% compared to PoW? So what’s stopping a large miner from racking up a bunch of little NUC’s, significantly decreasing electricity consumption and continuing to earn ETH via staking? Wouldn’t the cost benefit of that lower electricity usage dwarf that of the daisy chained GPU setups? Even small miners that have seen a decreasing benefit due to lower prices have had ample opportunity to accumulate in preparation of a future change. Lower electricity use not only being a beneficial to cost of operation, but societal cost as well. Given one of the largest detractors for the function of these PoW chains is the power they require. I can see the fork scenario being attempted, but do you really think there’s enough support on the mining side to pull that off? I just can’t wrap my head around why an overwhelming majority wouldn’t voluntarily transition to something that benefits their wallets for the long term. That’s given that mining is not simply a several months value proposition, but several years.
That's cool. I have an Intel NUC connected to a blockclock mini. It's more like a DIY solution.
No pic but I have an old Intel NUC running Ubuntu upgraded from 18.04 to 22.04 (over 4 years) running my node.
There are [400000](https://beaconcha.in/) validators ready to take over from the existing miners. Each validator requires negligible hardware to run, with the lower end being around a [Raspberry Pi](https://docs.rocketpool.net/guides/node/local/prepare-pi.html). Each machine can also run dozens or hundreds of validators with very little extra overhead. What people are ACTUALLY running can only be estimated, but I think a conservative ballpark estimation is 100W per node and 2 validators per node. This gives us a total of 100W*400000/2, or 20MW. This can be powered by [8 average wind turbines. ](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-homes-can-average-wind-turbine-power) Anecdotally, in the Rocketpool community, there seems to be dominance of Intel NUC and an average of 5 validators per node. If this is representative of the broader community, then there's a total of 40W*400000/5, or 3.2 MW. This. Can be powered by slightly more than one average wind turbine. Ethereum miners today are estimated to spend around 112 terrawatthours per year, which is a constant load of 12.8 GW, or 4655 wind turbines.
I'm actually in the process of moving my email in-house again. :) Bought an intel NUC and going to setup and OpenSMTPd system. Long live decentralization and owning your own data!
More like \~6.5%, and the ETH inflation is low enough that makes the returns -actually- lucrative. The 10%+ returns on staking on other PoS chains are purely from inflation, which heavily dilutes the price. And it'll probably be awhile until there are 1 million validators. Actually, it's very cheap to run a validator. I have a $800 NUC here at home, I pay maybe an extra $30 a month for higher data cap, and electricity costs are negligible. I recouped the costs fairly quickly. Also, I only maintain it a total of 5 minutes a month.
To be honest, in the next few upgrades a Pi might not be strong enough to run. But Intel NUC's are very popular now for bakers, that mixed with a solid M.2, UPS and a nice bit of RAM and you'll have a lovely little bakery.