Subnostr

Oh damn i hadn’t heard of those, looks awesome. That’s a miner though which is a different thing than a humble node

The nodes are the ones validating transactions that the miners use for all the hashing and the new (and old) blocks that the miners mine, by verifying they are in fact signed by the private key of the public key from which came the on-chain address being used as the input of a transaction, per the record of the entire timechain they have on their hard drive

Legend has it, miners and nodes were once the same thing. But those times are gone. I think when people say mining is too centralized, a big part of that is that even for someone with ASIC machines (miners) running in their own home, the node they have to use to connect to the Bitcoin protocol are the ones associated with the mining pools they’re hashing in. And a vast majority if home miners are in pools as opposed to solo mining

The proof of work system and decentralizing developments on the horizon for mining kind of (in my opinion) make this apparent centralization not a huge concern, but i’m also dumb and maybe it is

But yeah the thing you mentioned is a miner, not a node. If you do want to run a node you should probably start by checking out umbrel and start9 and get your own hardware, but not a raspberry pi, maybe something a little better suited. There are many good threads and guides on doing this including on those two projects’ websites

no₿ody™ 🧱 1y ago

Why run a node you might ask, well that would be a great question!

Yes miners earn that freshy fresh virgin corn just minted in a new block, as well as the transaction fees, minus the pool’s toll and proportional only to the real-time hash rate they contribute to that pool when it mines a block

No, nodes do not earn any corn at all. Some people will tell you if you run lightning on your node and stack good channels, you’ll route a ton of payments and make some sats off it, and they would not be lying. But that is not easy to do and the rewards are not that great.

The point of running a node is, well there are plenty of reasons, but imo it’s mostly to validate your own transactions and have your bitcoin wallets only speak to the network through your own node.

This is because otherwise you are trusting whatever node the wallet you use connects to by default. I don’t think even this is a huge concern because, again, this is honest money to its core (but again i’m also dumb). So you have various tested, reviewed, open-source options that have integrity and for those you can generally trust that the nodes they would connect you with also have integrity. It’s almost an ironic renewal of the ability to trust bc these things are built to cater to this pretty much trustless system.

But still, better to run your own because you never want to share more information than you need to regardless of who it is. They would know your straight up xpub aka public key which means all of the addresses that belong to that wallet.

So that feature where one wallet always makes a new address when you receive sats, those are all cryptographically derived from your public/private keys, and it is meant to preserve your privacy. But whoever runs that node sees through it. Who are they, what if they do sell it or hand it over to some authority? I believe it might even include info like IP address. You certainly wouldn’t want to connect to a default node for a non-kyc corn stash for example.

TLDR of this one is that running your own node (over tor) is basically way better for privacy and self sovereignty despite the lack of monetary rewards

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