Nostr Web Client

I don't see a lot of people talking about running nodes on commodity hardware anymore. At the meetups, people tell me how "expensive" it is to get a node, thinking they have to buy some custom 12th gen i7 microPC and a support license they will probably never leverage anyways.

Four and a half years ago, this raspberry pi 4 (8gb) + external HDD was sufficient for an enthusiast to be up and running with a full, archival, indexed bitcoin+lightning node within a couple days.

Let's see how long it takes in 2025.

Filou 7mo ago

Totally still possible! If it’s a node for personal use, making payment, zaps, etc. no issues. It’s more when people try running a routing node with lots of channels they run into problems pretty quick!

My first node was almost identical, same RasPi and case- only difference I had the expansion board to use NVME drive which I thought was much better since there was no need for the external usb drive- that’s a bottleneck and potential point of failure imo.

But again for personal use / experimenting it’s more than fine as-is!

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Discussion

semisol 7mo ago

I am waiting for the bitcoin community to discover tiered storage

Rich Nost 7mo ago

It would be nice if these node "distributions" like Umbrel or Start9 had some sort of tiered storage solution. But the experience is limited to "select the target storage device" at installation.

semisol 7mo ago

Indexes in SSD. Block data in HDD.

UTXO set bloat might change this though :/

But at least we're getting cheaper and faster SSDs