Sorry conspiracy theorists, taco stands in LA come with their own chemtrail sprayers. ✈️
Moar pastor for me. 🌮🌮🌮
I have two related goals for Pacific Bitcoin this week:
1. Meet nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a and ask her to sign my copy of her book.
2. Give her a nostr:npub17tyke9lkgxd98ruyeul6wt3pj3s9uxzgp9hxu5tsenjmweue6sqq4y3mgl to build*!
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*(I also brought a Pi Zero with the headers already soldered on, but I assume that she's such a badass that she'll opt to solder it herself)
Ha, oh boy. NerdMiner is a cool toy with a beautiful UI. Just keep in mind that:
S9: ~13,500,000,000,000 hashes / sec (~$100)
NerdMiner: 55,000 hashes / sec (~$20 in parts)
If you feel yourself tempted to build a second Nerdminer... don't!
Awesome!
Settle in and enjoy the setup, see how it runs over time, explore the other tools it has available, but -- as a nod to the Umbrel critics -- set a longer term goal to eventually migrate some of the more mission-critical services off of Umbrel.
I tend to make a big push into a particular deep dive, but once I get it to a good-enough state, I need a good long breather before I can muster the energy to dive in even deeper. tldr: take your time.
Getting any kind of node running on something that isn't a Raspi is already winning ~91% of the battle.
There are definitely ways to do LA wrong.
Santa Monica / the Westside is a dream (but expensive). The rest of LA is traffic hell. I almost never had any reason or interest to go east of the 405. You also learn when to tolerate the freeway traffic and when to rearrange your day accordingly.
And certain areas, like Hollywood, are just complete trash. I hate that tourists think it's a must-see. It has zero connection with the actual film industry, it's gross, and it's completely locked on all sides in traffic hell.
I lived in LA for 6yrs. You'd think that over time you'd start to take the beauty here for granted. Get used to it, stop noticing it.
Nope.
(at least not if you've spent most of the rest of your life dealing with Chicago winters)
Y'all really shoulda come to LA this week.
The average user probably wouldn't ever need to even use the cli. You'd just point other tools (e.g. mempool.space) to your daemon instance and those provide the easy access to your node's data.
The only other important, slightly harder task is to set up an Electrum indexing server (electrs, Fulcrum, electrum-personal-server, etc) for tools like Sparrow to talk to.
It's not really hard, but overall it is a pretty big step change for someone that isn't already pretty proficient in the linux / dev ops world.
Never heard of Trisquel before. Is that second screenshot a separate monitoring app on a phone?
Woot! As I'm sure you've seen by now, it takes a few minutes to do that initial header sync and then the blocks start flying down.
That being said, I'm not a huge fan of the Bitcoin Core gui. At least on mac/Windows, afaik it doesn't install bitcoind as a daemon (background service that always runs) so your node is only up and staying in sync when the gui is up. For some use cases that's fine. But won't work if you also want to run things like mempool.space.
Meh. Specs get it caught up to an 8yr old laptop's specs.
I really don't know what the ideal target market is for the Raspi5. I guess it's still mostly for DIY tinkerers who want to do Linux + gpios to wire up additional devices (sensors, motors, etc). And as tech marches forward, sure, they can make it more powerful at the previous model's price point.
But if you don't care about the gpios... just get a dedicated computer that's built for reliability and real-world / enterprise use and abuse.
That being said, sourcing a good deal on a used PC from elsewhere in the world... I can see how that could be a challenge.
Agreed.
Hopefully this kind of build ends up being a stepping stone to a more secure, more robust setup later on. A useful stage but not the end destination.
It's like self-custody with single sig; having it at all is way better than not doing any self-custody, but there are lots of not really solvable risks with single sig.
The hope is that they get comfortable and then level up to multisig when they're ready.
Ooh, "your" accent is easy for me to (mostly) understand (plus it's a topic I already know, so that helps my brain translate) and your deliberate pacing/delivery is the right speed for my Spanish uptake, too. Add auto-generated captions in Spanish and English and we'll have a great new language acquisition practice tool!
A nostr:npub1h8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wq36rpev read would also be an ideal fit.
...in exchange for the nicest and easiest UI I've seen so far with the broadest app selection.
As I start playing with some of the other node packagers, if any of them are good enough on all of those points, amazing.
But at the zero tech skill level, there are going to be tradeoffs.
I'm a FOSS dev but more than that, I'm a pragmatist.
Same tradeoff as a one-click LunaNode btcpay VM. Trust vs convenience to lower the skill barrier to entry.
Simplest possible laptop build ain't gonna be the most secure nor the most sovereign.
Someone suggested RaspiBlitz which has the same installation approach:
It is what it is. 🤷🏻♂️
1. It's referred to as IBD, not IBV. Just following convention.
2. "Early blocks were mostly empty and therefore trivial to verify so the laptop FLIES through them." So, yes, I'm aware.
The easiest #bitcoin node setup I've tried so far is:
* Debian 12 w/XFCE desktop gui
* Umbrel
Debian installer is good. Simple enough for almost anyone.
Only other task is to get Umbrel installed... in just TWO SIMPLE COMMANDS!
* `apt install curl`
* `curl -L https://umbrel.sh | bash`
BUT THERE'S A "BUT"!!
It's only this simple if I log in as `root`. The user that the setup creates doesn't have `sudo` access. Obv I can add the user to sudoers, but now we're getting deeper into linux and losing the total noob simplicity.
I'm not a linux security expert. At all.
Is it a "Nope, unacceptable!" to install and run the Umbrel docker containers as `root`?
Yup! Hoping to convince more and more Bitcoiners to migrate their nodes off Raspis and onto better, cheaper equipment!
Yo, initial block download through the early #bitcoin blocks is WILD to watch live!
Early blocks were mostly empty and therefore trivial to verify so the laptop FLIES through them. Dayum!