Why you should run a bitcoin node

• How to Install Bitcoin Core on Your Computer
• Connecting Your Node to Your Wallet Software
• You don’t need to be a techie or an altruist to run a node
  • 🤙 Pura Vida!

A bitcoin node is a computer running bitcoin software. It allows users to interact with the bitcoin network to do things like view and broadcast transactions.

If you don’t have bitcoin software installed on your computer, you are relying on someone else’s computer to:

1. Verify transactions
2. Broadcast your own transactions

This has obvious privacy and censorship risk, because the node you’re connecting to can see all your transactions, track your IP address and refuse to broadcast certain transactions, for example to “blacklisted” addresses.

For these important reasons, you should run bitcoin software directly on your own computer. Thankfully, it’s incredibly easy for anyone to do this with their existing computers, no additional hardware is required.

§How to Install Bitcoin Core on Your Computer

1. Download Bitcoin Core from the official download page
2. Follow the installation instructions

Note that it is unnecessary for you to download and store the entire blockchain and run a so-called “full node”. You can prune the blockchain to 4 GB to save space on your computer. If you feel the desire to store the entire blockchain, make sure you have at least 2 TB of available space (as of March 2024)

§Connecting Your Node to Your Wallet Software

Most popular wallet software allows you to specify which node you should connect to, and most have some default settings to detect if Bitcoin Core is already installed on your computer. Here are some guides to walk you through step by step:

• Sparrow Wallet
• Trezor
• Ledger

I strongly recommend using Sparrow Wallet, it works with nearly all hardware wallets (signing devices).

§You don’t need to be a techie or an altruist to run a node

As you can see, anyone capable of clicking “next” a few times in a software installer is capable of running a node.

You don’t need to run a node to “help decentralize bitcoin”, you run a node for selfish reasons and those incentives alone will decentralize the network.

You also definitely don’t need to buy a raspberry pi or a pre-made node like Umbrel or Start9, these are usually very expensive solutions with terrible hardware. Your cheap laptop is already much more powerful than a raspberry pi.

Any questions? Tag me on nostr with your question and I’ll do my best to help you out.

§🤙 Pura Vida!