Bitcoin Node with RaspiBlitz
Make the Bitcoin network bigger with a Pi and a large storage device.
YOU’RE NOT GOING TO get rich mining Bitcoin on a Raspberry Pi. Even with dedicated ASIC mining hardware, it’s hard to compete with industrial operations in countries with subsidized electricity supplies. It’s the same for other cryptocurrencies too – see www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/ mine-cryptocurrency-raspberry-p.
Yet you can still use RaspiBlitz to turn your Pi into a full Bitcoin node and store your bitcoins locally —you’re essentially self-sovereign as you haven’t entrusted your keys to others and you aren’t relying on other nodes to supply information. To quote the RaspiBlitz manual: “Not your node, not your rules”.
PUT SOME STORAGE IN PLACE
Running a full node involves regularly syncing the Bitcoin blockchain, which at present is 350GB and growing, so you’ll need some large external storage—a 1TB or larger external SSD. Ideally, you want your node to be online all the time, but if you have a fast internet connection, it’s easy enough to catch up after some downtime. Bitcoin nodes verify new transactions before sending them to miners, and record new blocks as they’re mined, so they can’t do anything useful until they’re synced.
Using a 3.5-inch LCD touch display to run RaspiBlitz is recommended but you can also run it headless. It’s also advised to use a heatsink to avoid damage from overheating. Fetch the SD card image from https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz, write it to an SD card (minimum 16GB), and use it to boot
your Pi. If you have the recommended XPT2046 display, this will be used automatically and will display the device’s IP address. If not you can use a tool such as Nmap to get this information and then connect from another device with, say
$ ssh admin@192.168.178.47 and using the default raspiblitz password.
The setup wizard will walk you through setting up passwords, storage, and syncing the blockchain. Once you log in again you’ll be presented with the options screen where you can tweak settings and set up as a node on the Lightning Network (see below). Note that for others to connect to your node, you’ll need to open port 8333 on your router (and use a dynamic DNS service if you don’t have a static IP at home). For Lightning, you’ll also need ports 9735, 10009 and 8080 to be open. You can also open a command prompt from the main menu, but don’t be tempted to run apt update or such. There are instructions for updating RaspiBlitz on the project page and if you don’t follow them there will be tears.