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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.

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Discussion

Nyoro~n 7mo ago 💬 1

is that a spinning disk external drive?

Rich Nost 7mo ago

Yes

Nyoro~n 7mo ago

id say a month 😵

do report back, curious 🤓

Rich Nost 6mo ago

3 weeks so far. Just hit 2025 today. Block height 880559. Little guy is crawling and has yet to even hit the assumevalid height yet. 🥲

Nyoro~n 6mo ago

faster than i expected

I thought you might have given up 🤭

Rich Nost 6mo ago

Your estimate is looking to be dead-on!

Wonteet Zebugs 7mo ago

I find it's cheaper to just buy a used desktop on ebay. I get better specs for cheaper, and normal desktops don't flake out as much as raspberry pis do. RPs are really for educational purposes, they're great educational tools for kids. But having them run 24/7 is risky in my opinion.

Rich Nost 7mo ago

Yup. Don't disagree. This is educational.

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!

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 💬 1

Indexes in SSD. Block data in HDD.

UTXO set bloat might change this though :/

But at least we're getting cheaper and faster SSDs

Rich Nost 6mo ago 💬 8

The little raspberry pi 4 node with the external hard drive is still syncing the chain after a little over 2 weeks. It's wading through the middle of 2024 at a clip of about a month of chain data per day. Height 854027.

nostr:nevent1qqs2ppyhes8242ewz6kkt8mwws6sfy7762u4h4eu88x2t8jqssxs3jcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygqnhj2ajgwgk6exeu65jjtymtuxlycjlegfy3yr6fngy7temqyf05psgqqqqqqs7lqdzd

ben 6mo ago

🫡

casey 6mo ago

My refurb dell micro was only $75 usd

Rich Nost 6mo ago

Yup. I love the Optiplex desktops with 7th to 9th gen Intel processors and 8-16gbs of RAM. They run core fine and can easily be a fully synced node in 2-5 days.

ed 6mo ago

$100 mac mini +$150 of upgrades is still alla it takes.

acronym 6mo ago

Old laptop, upgrade HDD to SSD, NixOS, nix-bitcoin, done.

Rich Nost 6mo ago

Got one of those running right now. Dell Optiplex with the importable config strategy and flakes.