A new full node is born.

Hello all people,

I’m joyful to report {that a} new Bitcoin & Lightning full node is now up and operating to help the community.

I’ve been wanting to do that for a number of months however I didn’t have a spare machine to make use of for this particular objective and truthfully I used to be not even positive what to make use of. Raspberry Pi with Umbrel regarded like the most suitable choice for ease of set up and use however provide chain shortages and value hikes made me wait a bit extra and search for higher offers.

Lengthy story brief, I didn’t purchase a Raspberry Pi and I didn’t use Umbrel.

Listed below are the small print about my Bitcoin & Lightning full node:

HARDWARE

Beelink U59 Professional mini PC.

It was on sale on Amazon, I obtained it for € 245,00. Comes with a single 8 GB RAM stick and a 512GB M.2 SATA SSD which is mainly the boot drive with the working system and all of the functions. I maxed out the RAM at 16GB with two sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2933MHz which had been on sale as effectively and price me € 30,00. The U59 Professional has room for a second 2.5” SATA drive so I put in a Essential MX500 2TB SATA SSD that I had laying round and that’s the place the Bitcoin blockchain and the Fulcrum database are saved.

OPERATING SYSTEM

Ubuntu MATE 22.04.2 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

I carried out a minimal set up. I’m not tremendous proficient with the terminal so I opted for MATE because it’s a fork of the outdated Gnome 2 desktop setting which is my favourite. A little bit of eye sweet doesn’t damage, I suppose.

BITCOIN & LIGHTNING STACK

• Bitcoin Core v24.0.1
• Fulcrum Electrum Server v1.9.1
• JoinMarket v0.9.9
• Jam for JoinMarket v0.1.5
• Mempool v2.5.0
• Lightning Community Daemon v0.16.0-beta
• Lightning Terminal (LiT) v0.9.0-alpha
• Journey The Lightning v0.13.6-beta
• Boltz Alternate v1.2.7-862ab4a
• Thunderhub v0.13.18

It’s been an ideal studying expertise thus far. Two days in the past I didn’t even know find out how to clone a GitHub repository and now all the things is working as anticipated. I nonetheless have to study much more particularly on coinjoins and Lightning generally however I’m actually proud of what I’ve achieved thus far.

The principle sources of data to construct my full node are Ministry Of Nodes’ video tutorials on YouTube and the unimaginable RaspiBolt information. Each have been very helpful to get me began on this stunning undertaking, however I confronted some points from time to time because of the truth that I used to be coping with newer variations of the apps and issues didn’t work out of the field on a regular basis so I needed to RTFM right here and there.

Do I remorse not going with Umbrel? Sure.

Was this all value it tho? YES²⁵⁶.

Please take into account operating a node. Take care.