Perhaps read about me. I'm not super mobile anymore.

I think those are the 14000, perhaps.

I asked grok what it takes to switch to tor and it seems fairly easy.

thats are the china ones :)

Many reasons. I'm getting mine configured. Had to back it out but I'll try again.

In short, imagine driving down a street knowing which houses run nodes. Now imagine it in five to ten years at a $1,000,000.

Grok is good. He can react to problems and remember paths and variables.

I think walk though configuration videos are probably dying out already.

Increased on-chain transactional privacy. Education. Being a good community member. Assisting the network that is assisting you. Those sorts of things. Come join in, it makes you a true citizen of Bitcoin with a small but important vote in the future direction of the network if you actively select your node software/upgrades.

It's how you vote in Bitcoin Consensus Protocol. Somebody tries to change the rules of Bitcoin and you don't agree? Your node will enforce the consensus rules you agree with. It gives you a voice on the protocol.

Good question.

Let's say you have your corn in cold-storage. You transact, send, receive, etc. Maybe you are a bitcoin treasury, maybe just someone that wants to not have your IP associated with your wallet.

If you check a public node, your IP goes with that check and now someone knows you are associated with that wallet and what your IP is - admittedly almost as good as a physical address these days.

If you check YOUR node, no one knows anything. If you run your node over TOR through a VPN with no logs, not even that.

Also, you support consensus.

You can also run a Nostr relay on your node. That is my next project.

Lightning nodes can also be configured. I think that will be later, assuming I'm around.

node operators determine what Bitcoin is.

that is to say: the consensus mechanism is held in the node software & by choosing which version of Bitcoin software to run on your node you are effectively placing your vote on which software is the real Bitcoin software

no node, no vote

Hello millennial.

If you just want a basic node to send and validate transactions it doesn't need to be online 24/7. You can just get an SSD and intall bitcoin core via your desktop PC. You will need sync the chain every time you start the app, but you can do that in the background.

Why not?

Cheap old laptop can be acquired basically anywhere for less than $140. Built-in battery backup and because it's a laptop you can run it on solar perpetually due to its meager power draw 🤓

I used a Nucbox, it is just a minipc. They are about $200 on Amazon. I'll link the one I got. You can evidently run one on Windows, but from what I read Linux is highly preferable. I knew absolutely nothing about Linux, although I admit I have been in a technical position as a developer, DBA, data architect, and I've run multiple windows based GPU mining rigs back when that was something worth trying.

I started by asking Grok what I would need. Then I ordered a NucBox with enough drive space (1TB minimum) and decent RAM.

I literally had Grok walk me through the whole thing and it was a very, very long discussion as I had many problems and had to repartition the windows drive and learn about Linux along the way.

Hint: If you go this way, tell grok to give you one step at a time, otherwise he spits out the whole plan, you run into a problem on step 2 and the thread gets huge.

This is what I bought. It has room for 4 NVME drives which is a huge amount of room. I have 59 incoming connections to my Node, which is kinda cool.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DRYL8J7N

This is my understanding:

This count does include accessible TOR nodes, as indicated by the ".onion: +0.9%" in the protocol breakdown. This means 0.9% of the 22,313 nodes (approximately 201 nodes) are accessible via TOR.

Maybe you mean private TOR nodes?

Yes. They are in the unknown n/a part.

It’s how you verify. Otherwise you don’t know what your wallet is connected to.

Nice , I like It