Running bitcoin
— halfin (@halfin) January 11, 2009
Running bitcoin. It’s one of the most prolific tweets in all of Bitcoin history. Hal Finney was among the first to run bitcoin back in January of 2009 along with Satoshi Nakamoto.
What began as just one quickly grew into thousands of Bitcoin nodes all around the world, upholding the integrity of the Bitcoin protocol.
One of the key features of bitcoin is in its permissionless nature. Anyone can be a part of it. So why not run a node yourself?
Why Run A Bitcoin Node?
Bitcoin nodes are the backbone of the Bitcoin network. Without them, bitcoin simply would not exist. They uphold the Bitcoin consensus rules and thus protect the network from outside attacks.
Running a node yourself allows you to participate in that consensus as well as take real ownership of all aspects of your money. You can send and receive transactions without relying on a third party by running your own node. There’s no need to trust a block explorer, because you can verify everything against your very own copy of the blockchain and ensure that your bitcoin is relying on the authentic Bitcoin blockchain.
You can even use your own node to orange pill your friends and family and show them how easy it is to become a part of the actual Bitcoin network.
While not very cheap, as little as a few hundred dollars will allow you to set up your own Bitcoin node and begin downloading the entire blockchain to your own local server. Let’s take a look at 10 good reasons why you should run a Bitcoin node.
1. Uphold The Bitcoin Consensus Rules
The most important reason to run a Bitcoin node is to protect and uphold the Bitcoin consensus rules. Bitcoin nodes verify each and every Bitcoin transaction and block to ensure that none of them violate the Bitcoin consensus rules. By verifying all new transactions and blocks, it ensures that no one can manipulate the network and inflate the supply of bitcoin beyond what the consensus rules will allow.
Without the Bitcoin nodes, there wouldn’t be anyone protecting the network from double spends and other attacks against bitcoin.
2. Increase Your Own Privacy
Another one of the most important reasons to run a Bitcoin node is to practice good privacy. With a Bitcoin node, you can verify your own address balances, look up information on the blockchain without a third-party block explorer or trusting your own Bitcoin wallet.
Whenever you power on your Bitcoin wallet, it has to get the most up-to-date information about the blockchain. This means that it needs to connect to a record of the blockchain and make any updates to your address balances. In order to do that it needs your xPub key to query all of the addresses and then update your Bitcoin wallet.
If you are not running your own Bitcoin node, then your wallet has to query a random public node. You don’t know if that node is honest or if it’s working to break down the privacy of other bitcoiners. So for the best privacy, it’s safest to assume that every single node in the world is working to de-anonymize your stack, learn how much bitcoin you have, and which addresses belong to you.
When you run your own node, you no longer have to ask someone else’s node for anything. You can ask your own node running in your own house. This has substantial privacy implications for you because it makes it more difficult for bad actors to know what Bitcoin addresses belong to you and how much bitcoin you have.
3. Increase The Privacy Of Others
While you get substantially more privacy from running your own node, you can also help others to increase their own privacy as well by making it more difficult for an attacker to know who owns which addresses. When a bad actor is no longer able to know which addresses are yours, it makes it slightly more difficult for bad actors to know which addresses belong to others.
For example: If an attacker is trying to de-anonymize 100 addresses that are known to belong to either Alice or Bob, every address that they learn is owned by Alice is therefore NOT owned by Bob. This process of elimination erodes some of Bob’s privacy in the event that Alice’s privacy is compromised.
By running a Bitcoin node, you can help to make it more difficult for potential attackers to deanonymize Bitcoin addresses. When you increase your own privacy, you also slightly increase the privacy of other Bitcoin users who are trying to use bitcoin privately.
4. Don’t Trust Bitcoin. Verify It.
Unless you run your own Bitcoin node, you are trusting your Bitcoin wallet and/or block explorer to give you honest Bitcoin address balances and transaction data. When you run your own Bitcoin node, you no longer need to trust. You can verify your own address balances and make sure that you are getting the correct information from the blockchain itself.
Running your own Bitcoin node means that you have a full copy of the blockchain and enables you to ask your own node about the current status of the blockchain. You can verify a transaction, the balance of an address, the current block height, mempool congestion, on-chain fees, etc.
“Don’t trust. Verify.” is therefore another powerful reason why you should run a Bitcoin node.
5. Learn More About Bitcoin And How It Works
Learning all about bitcoin is a never-ending rabbit hole with all sorts of different twists and turns. One of the best ways to learn how bitcoin really works is to get into the command line and enter some commands to see what happens.
A popular command to “run the numbers” and audit the circulating supply of bitcoin is to “gettxoutsetinfo” and your node will tell you exactly how many bitcoin are currently in circulation and how many UTXOs are in existence.
But again, that’s just one way of countless to learn how bitcoin really works in a tangible fashion. Get your hands on a hardware device. Explore Bitcoin miners. For some, hearing and reading about bitcoin isn’t enough. Others need to feel it and interact with it to gather a deeper understanding, so find out what works best for you.
6. Run Other Bitcoin Related Apps
A lot of the most common Bitcoin nodes that run on a Raspberry Pi are also capable of running other Bitcoin-related apps, such as your own electrum server, or even a service to buy non-KYC bitcoin.
- Instead of using a third-party block explorer to lookup transactions, you can use one of the open-source block explorers that run on your Bitcoin node like mempool.space or the RPC block explorer.
- Instead of buying bitcoin from a centralized KYC platform, you can use Robosats to buy bitcoin privately.
- Instead of using a third-party payment system, you can accept bitcoin directly to your own Bitcoin wallet with services like BTCPay Server and SatSale. You can remove any third-party custodians taking a piece of your transaction or having to worry about your payments being stopped, censored, or seized.
By connecting your own node with software wallets like Sparrow Wallet, you can conduct CoinJoins, UTXO consolidation, and more entirely through your own node, ensuring that each transaction protects your privacy along the way.
Running your own Bitcoin node has a number of features that support the Bitcoin network itself, but there are also a number of other Bitcoin-related tools that make bitcoin an even more powerful tool to promote your own individual sovereignty.
6. Decentralize The Bitcoin Network
A big part of what makes bitcoin so secure is that it’s not under the control of any single entity. The network of Bitcoin nodes is decentralized and operated by a network of volunteers like you and me. When you run a Bitcoin node, you make it that much more difficult to attack the network because there are more nodes to target across hundreds of different jurisdictions.
The more Bitcoin nodes that are running around the world (and even space), the more decentralized and resilient the entire Bitcoin network becomes.
8. Run A Lightning Node & Earn Routing Fees
Speaking of Lightning nodes, you can run one yourself! Keeping a complete record of the blockchain decentralizes the blockchain itself, but one of the ways that bitcoin is scaling is with the Lightning network, and you can be a part of that.
Mempool.space shares an excellent live visualization of all the Lightning nodes emerging throughout the world:
One of the reasons to run a Bitcoin lightning node is to process lightning network payments in an attempt to earn some bitcoin from routing fees. If you’d like to see if you have what it takes to route payments on the Lightning network in an attempt to stack some extra sats, the Lightning network will probably always need more payment channels.
9. Orange Pill Friends & Family
One of the absolute best reasons to run a Bitcoin node is that it helps you to orange pill your friends and family. When they see your node sitting on the shelf at your house or office, the natural thing to do is ask questions.
Seeing a little computer sitting on your shelf or desk creates an excellent conversation piece. It helps to remove a good bit of the mystery when you can show them where every single Bitcoin transaction in history is stored. Instead of a large centralized server owned and operated by a multinational bank, the Bitcoin network is owned and operated by normal people like you and me. That can be an incredibly powerful tool to help people to understand just how simple bitcoin actually is.
If running your own node helped you to orange pill your friends and family, would you run one?
10. Because You Can
One of the most important differences between bitcoin and traditional finance is bitcoin’s open source and permissionless nature. If you want to take part in how the banking system works in your own country or jurisdiction, you need permission from countless committees, panels, and other unelected bureaucrats. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t because the entirety of the legacy financial system is owned and operated from the top down and normal people like you don’t have a say in how it works.
By contrast, if you want to run bitcoin, you simply can. No one is stopping you.
Running your own Bitcoin node is as simple as getting the hardware and downloading some free open-source code. You don’t have to run a Bitcoin node if you don’t want to, but having that option is one of the most important freedoms humans have today. It allows us as individuals to take control of our own financial future.
So, while running your own node isn’t required, it is one of the most empowering things you can do with bitcoin. It allows us to be part of the global financial revolution and take self custody of your own money.
Run Your Own Bitcoin Node
Once you understand even just a few of the reasons to run a Bitcoin node, the next logical step is to learn how to run a Bitcoin node and launch one yourself. Not only do you position yourself one step closer to hyperbitcoinization, but you uphold individual liberty in the digital age by taking back your freedom over how you participate in this global financial revolution.
So why not take part and run your own node? Even if you are just getting started with bitcoin, it’s easy, it’s fun, and it will help to build a new financial system that is owned by the many, not by the few. You’ll learn more about bitcoin along the way and deepen your understanding through tangible interaction with the protocol. All the while, taking full control of your money and making
The sooner you get started, the sooner you can begin to understand why running a Bitcoin node yourself is crucial to ensuring the long-term preservation of your bitcoin’s privacy.
Thank You For Reading
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