[ Intro ]--[ Hardware ]--[ Network ]--[ Odroid ]--[ Bash ]--[ Bitcoin ]--[ Lightning ]--[ Tor ]--[ Web Interface ]--[ Contact ]
Warning
Disclaimer: This guide was last updated in November 2018. Many things in it will likely be out of date now so proceed with caution and take everything with a grain of salt.
I've been telling myself for over a year that I'll set up a Bitcoin node, but I would always procrastinate. I don't have enough space left on my MacBook Pro, and the commonly and cheaply available RaspberryPi has several performance issues.
Then one day I saw Stadicus' article on Medium: "The perfect Bitcoin Lightning node". The photo of his Thundroid was oddly tantalizing, and I loved his choice of Odroid over RaspberryPi. The next thing I knew I was ordering an Odroid kit from South Korea.
While Stadicus' guide was a great starting point,
- I found myself craving explanations for the commands we were running (thank you Stackoverflow community for all the answers!).
- I quickly ran into technical issues not mentioned in the guide that had me stumpted for a while.
- I found that Stadicus was not very helpful when I emailed him about issues with his script.
- I found that the Thundroid guide was not as complete as the RaspiBolt guide.
- I wanted to skip the testnet and jump right into the mainnet.
- I wanted to install Bitcoin's blockchain directly from my node (my laptop doesn't have enough space).
- I wanted to make tweaks to Stadicus' customizations (especially in Bash).
- I wanted to jump into bonus stuff like Tor and a web interface.
So with that in mind, I created my own guide. At first it was private and for my own use. I used it kind of like a journal of sorts to try to better understand what I was doing in Stadicus' guide, to document issues I ran into (and the solutions that worked), and to keep track of the tweaks I made. I later realized that this could be useful for other newbies to have access to, so I polished it up a bit and made it public.
Note: This guide assumes you're on MacOS and are somewhat comfortable with Terminal.
Enjoy :)