{ "episodeId": "SLP411", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "my_longtime_friend": { "name": "My longtime friend", "role": "guest", "tag": "MY" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.49, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. So I'm just back from Baltic Honey Badger, I had a fantastic time, and just before that, I was over in Austin for Bitblock Boom, also an excellent conference. So today I'm speaking again with my friend K3tan, and we're talking about why Raspberry Pi Bitcoin nodes are bad. We talk about a range of reasons why, and I know I've previously promoted this way of running your Bitcoin node, but we get into why and how certain circumstances have changed and various other factors have come now that mean maybe we should be focusing more on performance, reliability, and other considerations. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the easy way to buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin. Swan makes various resources free, such as Jan Pritzkir's Inventing Bitcoin or Gigi's Twenty One Lessons. Now, Swan is organizing a conference in LA. It's called Pacific Bitcoin. Bitcoin, it's going to be on the 10th and 11th of November. There will be a main stage, a swan dome, and a Bitcoin lab. These conferences are also a great chance to meet people in the space, get some networking, meet the right people, and you will find all kinds of opportunities might open up. Over at PacificBitcoin dot com, you can get your tickets and you can also check out the lineup there. There's an awesome lineup of speakers, and there'll be a whole bunch of Bitcoiners who are really great to chat with. I'll be one On your tickets. This show is also brought to you by Bitbo dot io. This is a dashboard that you can use to just keep an eye on the overall Bitcoin ecosystem. You can see the price, you can see the sats per dollar, you can see a feed of articles over a Bitcoin magazine, you can see the blockchain statistics and how big the chain size is. So for example, as I'm recording this, it's four hundred and eighty-four gigabytes. You can see the mining stats, you can see closed end funds and the GPTC premium, premium as an example. You can see as well as the forward annual inflation rate. So that website is b i t b o dot i o. It's a great one to bookmark and periodically check in during your day. Mempool dot space is the Bitcoin explorer built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. So if you have a transaction you need to look up, you can use mempool dot space. And don't forget, you can also host mempool dot space in your own instance using your full node distribution, and so that way you can help preserve your own privacy. Now, mempool dot space is really awesome because they've got all kinds of statistics Recently announced in Baltikoni badge over at Riga, they have a Lightning Explorer, so you can now search Lightning nodes, you can also see Bitcoin transactions that are actually Lightning channel opens and closes, and they're marked on their site. So this is a really great benefit that you can get. Over one million people use mempool dot space every month. It's operated freely for the benefit of the Bitcoin community without ads or third party trackers. Now you can go and try this out over at mempool dot space. On to the show with K3tan. K3tan, welcome back to the show. Thank you, thanks for having me. I, mentioned you on stage at the Hoddle Hoddle, Baltic Honey Badger. So, while Warren was on stage, and, he was, attacking some of the Raspberry Pi nodes, and then he had to, go off for a little bit, and I was like, \"Yeah, my mate K3tan, he's also very bearish on Raspberry Pi Bitcoin nodes.\" And I thought, \"You know what? This is now the time to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:28", "start": 208.02, "text": "Content on this, I've made content on this, we've been putting it out there, but perhaps it's time to reconsider. But let's get your view as well. So why are Raspberry Pi nodes, why do they suck? Okay," }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "03:39", "start": 219.16, "text": "so let's get, so I'll, I'll, let me paint some context around why I think Raspberry Pi's aren't the best suited for Bitcoin nodes here in twenty twenty at least, sorry, twenty twenty two. Now, just to give you some context, Raspberry Pi's when they first came out, they marketed themselves as As these cheap thirty-five dollars computers, for kids to learn how to program and do little projects and hack, hack around, hack about with them. And I think what Bitcoiners wanted to prove was just how little system resources were required to run a Bitcoin node, right? And that would mean that it is accessible to everybody, and it was therefore somewhat decentralized because anyone could then verify their payments as well as broadcast transactions. onto the Bitcoin network without being censored by somebody else's node. For example, right? So these were, I guess, it, it was a, a great thing that, you know, you didn't need a huge server, you didn't need lots of wealth, you know, a cheap thirty-five pound, you know, Raspberry Pi, everyone could do this in a relatively affordable way. And so I think that still is the case, however, I just think that there's better ways of going about it. And when you fast forward to- 2022, there's now a shortage in Raspberry Pis, and the ones that you wanna get, like the Raspberry Pi four with eight gigabytes of RAM, I had a look on eBay, and you're looking at Australian dollars, three to four hundred dollars with the good power supply, with maybe a case and other peripherals like a micro SD card, and you're looking at about three to four hundred dollars, and that's not including the one terabyte, solid state drive that, you'll also need to run, you know, the blockchain, or to, to store the And so I thought, wow, that has, that, that's changed significantly. And whether that changes, i-in, you know, in the future, to more positive or negative, wh-who knows, right? Hopefully they do come back down. But at this point, we're looking at a, a serious shortage. I know guys who are messaging me on Twitter saying, \"Hey, do you know where I can get a Raspberry Pi in Australia?\" I'm like, \"Mate, I, I have no idea. I haven't been able to get one.\" and so market or just unable to find them, they're just not available in stock. and so that was one, I think, hurdle that we're now seeing with Raspberry Pis in twenty twenty-two at least, is that they're just-- there isn't enough of them. But I think there's also other, so aside from the availability, I think there's also reliability concerns on them. So processor speeds are quite slow on Raspberry Pi's, they're slow and clunky. I know guys who have taken two weeks to do an initial blockchain download now with obviously the, the, the, the, the chain growing, you know, pretty much every day, every ten minutes. So to sync up to the chain tip is taking longer and longer. RAM is also becoming a bottleneck. So system resources like- Like, for example, an Electrum server which needs to index at that time, RAM is being used and sometimes that can, you know, i-i-it's very slow and, and painful. There are obviously ways to sort of somewhat mitigate these, but, you know, you have to be a bit more technical to do that. And then I've heard other issues like USB cable issues, like the, the cable to plug in from your Raspberry Pi into, the solid state drive, that's a bit flimsy. I know guys who have had, you know, Getting the right power supply to be able to, you know, put enough voltage into the Raspberry Pi, so they're getting voltage leaks, and so, you know, after a while, it just sort of cucks out, it doesn't recognize, or, or it underpowers itself, and then there's overheating issues, so some guys aren't putting in, a he-- a heat sink or they're not, using a fan or something to cool this, this Raspberry Pi down, so, you know, three days in To their too weak initial blockchain download, the whole thing carks itself, because it's overheated. So these are some of the challenges that I'm seeing, you know, and, you know, there are many variables to your experience. Some have a really, really good time, like if you look at the thing that I did, the, the video series on, on my node that I did back in May of 2020, hey, that was a breeze, I could, you know, that was, that, that went really, really well for me." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "08:10", "start": 490.04, "text": "See the types of questions people are asking and, and problems people are facing, you're like, \"Wow, this is, yeah, it's, we're seeing lots of issues come through.\" and so, you know, some people are having a great time. Over the long term, we don't know yet what the, you know, give that, you know, two, three years and let's come back and see, okay, what exactly has, been the outcome of those, those Bitcoin nodes. And I think you may come to the conclusion that you might need" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:40", "start": 520.06, "text": "That's, I mean, those are very good points, and the, the reality is it's not just about setting it up, it's about maintaining and running that operation over time. And so while it's relatively easy to do that first download sync, I mean, even that is a bit slow on the Raspberry Pi, but, you know, but I, I think you make a very good point that it was also that the community was trying to come back to this idea that, okay, look at all the shit coins, they're all hosted on AWS or one of the big virtuals, pro service, virtual provider, you know, services anyway, whereas we in Bitcoin, we can do it on a Raspberry Pi. And I think maybe that was part of the argument at that time, but I think there's also the concern that, well, look, most people in the Western world might have better options anyway, like just cost-pound for pound, we might have more reliable options that are more battle-tested in other arenas, let's say. and so I think this is also what, some of what Warren Togami was getting at in his talk, which was also around Security. That actually the Raspberry Pi operating systems may not be updated as frequently from a security point of view, and that from his point of view, he's saying, \"Look, you know what? Why don't people just get ThinkPads? You can buy those online, and, you know, this is something I've been playing around as well. I've, you know, you can get, you know, ThinkPads for a couple hundred dollars, and you can buy an SSD for a couple hundred dollars. And so the reality is, net net, once it all comes out, you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:10", "start": 610.02, "text": "Business world, right? ThinkPads are like a very typical laptop or road warrior businessman laptop. So that's, that's just one example, and then you've got those Nucs, and of course, we've got your favorite, the Dell Optiplex. So do you wanna talk to us about some of the alternatives then? So if we're shooting on Raspberry Pis, what's the alternative that we're trying to bring instead? And that's the" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "10:31", "start": 631.05, "text": "thing, right? Whenever you shoot on something, whenever you see a problem, you must also provide a solution. Now, I'm big on that." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "10:40", "start": 640.06, "text": "cost-effective is a cheap refurbished PC, usually some ex-leased business computer. the Dell guys have, the Optiplex range, which is fantastic. HP has, EliteDesk, Lenovo has ThinkCentre, they are all great options depending on, you know, whichever brand you wanna support. But if you have a look, like, here is a Dell Optiplex, okay? for the guys on the YouTube stream, you'll be able to see this, but obviously on audio, basically have a look at the size of my hand here, Stefan. It's, it Very, heavy at all, and you could take this, this is tra-- like you can travel with this. so it's not that different to a Raspberry Pi. This is a Dell Optiplex in the ultra small form factor sort of, i-in the, in the case, right? So I think these are reasonable options that have a lot more grunt. These come with either an i3 or an i5, this has an i5 processor in it. They, it comes with eight gigabytes of RAM, and the SSD is actually inside the case, so you don't Running around. it's all inside the one case, and all you need to do is really put a network cable in and put the power supply in, and it's job done. It, this becomes a, a, a lot cleaner, and it's, it, it's, it's not that much bigger than a Raspberry Pi. Okay? I, I would-- Yes, it is, granted, it is bigger, but it's not that bad, okay?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:02", "start": 721.55, "text": "Yeah. And the reliability and also if you could just outline the computer power differences between, let's say, that Optip" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "12:10", "start": 730.02, "text": "I think those have like one point two gigahertz, this has, you know, this has an i5 processor, eight gigs of RAM, okay, fair enough on the, on the timescale, but I think the processing power there is gonna be better. The connections is more that I'm more concerned about. It's, you have a direct SATA connection from your hard drive, into the motherboard, whereas the USB is just, it's just flimsy, man. And so I just don't like that whole approach of just USB-ing it in. So I think, On, on one of these bad boys, twelve hours. Okay, that's the difference. We're talking two weeks initial blockchain download versus twelve hours." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:47", "start": 766.74, "text": "Right. So we're just talking massively better processing power, right? Like, and this is like a cheaply available and, and if you don't wanna do the OptiPlex thing, you can get an old laptop, and that's, you know, exactly also gonna be similarly more powerful. The other thing is, like, I, I" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "12:59", "start": 778.95, "text": "looked at Oz, like, on Oz Bargain Feend, and Oz Bargain here in Australia is just" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "13:10", "start": 790.04, "text": "Like that, that, that case that I saw, that, that's two hundred dollars plus another two terabyte SSD for another two hundred, two three hundred dollars, and for five hundred Australian dollars, you are looking at a very, very future proof Bitcoin node, and I think that that's probably a better outcome. And the other thing is that, you know, I've got the video tutorials there up on Ministry of Nodes YouTube channel, so there's some video tutorials that you can go through, and I take you through all of this step by step. And so obviously, I- I think these are the best Bitcoin nodes, but admittedly I am slightly biased there because, you know, it's what I do. And so, yeah, you're reducing your sync times, you're making it more reliable, you're making it robust, it's still portable, and, again, as you suggested, if you're not into those, you can use an old ThinkPad or an old laptop that you can, yeah, you can, you know, repurpose for the purposes of running a Bitcoin node. Now, the great thing about laptops, as you mentioned, is that there's an added benefit" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "14:10", "start": 850.04, "text": "So, your battery will at least keep going for another couple of hours, and you can safely shut, shut down the laptop rather than, you know, cut, cutting the power and potentially, you know, disrupting things. Yeah, corrupting disk, you know, functions and those sorts of things. So that's, that's another issue, a-and that's another great option is to use these general-purpose computers, they're the best for, you know, running your Bitcoin node on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:33", "start": 873.15, "text": "Yeah, and one other thing with the laptops is they typically have Wi-Fi" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:40", "start": 880.06, "text": "Less cable you need to deal with also. Now, of course, some of those old ThinkPads, they've got the Ethernet cable as well, so if you wanna do Ethernet, you know, you're not stopped out on that option. But I think it's something where we've seen, obviously with the whole Raspberry Pi thing, we've seen a bit of a culture around that on Bitcoin Twitter, and, you know, we see people make these, 3D printed cases and whenever, you know, there's like a whole culture around this about, about doing it on a Raspberry Pi. reliable way, and are there very security considerations and practical considerations around using a laptop or a Optiplex or something like this instead of the Raspberry Pi model, because it might lead to more reliability?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "15:21", "start": 921.48, "text": "Exactly. the, the, the point that I'd make on security though is I think if you're running, just a, you know, a word of warning when, when it comes to running a Bitcoin node, if you're just installing Bitcoin, an Electrum server, maybe Mempool dot space and BTC Pay server, there's no actual need to put private key information You don't need a private key. Your private key can always sit on a hardware wallet or externally on your Sparrow wallet or something like that. It's only when you install Lightning and Whirlpool that keys are actually ending up on the device. But I would advise that you keep those two functions to a minimum, so you wouldn't put your entire stack onto Lightning, for example. Like that's just, you know, you're asking for trouble when you do that. So you'd probably have three wallets. You'd have a savings wallet, you'd have an on-chain spending/slash-mixing wallet Wallet. And the, the, the, you know, the on-chain spending and the mixing might be in the node if you've decided to set up Whirlpool. And Lightning, of course, needs to be hot as well. So you'd, you'd minimize those things, when it comes to-- So from a security standpoint, what's at risk isn't your biggest stack, it's just the smaller spending amounts that you, you know, not to say that you want to lose them, but it, it won't hurt you if you do." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:36", "start": 996.05, "text": "Right. Yeah. And so there What we're doing, and of course, that some of that just follows on from our general discussion about the way we all talk about Bitcoin security and the general, the prevailing thought is generally that you keep your cold keys offline, you try to ideally never have them touch an online computer, and that's where, let's say, in this example, your savings might be, let's say, a multisig, and you've got that with different hardware wallets from different manufacturers, and you're keeping, you know, the backups for that, you know, metal seeds and all, all that, and the idea is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:10", "start": 1030.28, "text": "Not like a, a be-all and all. I know there's debates in the community about whether airgapping helps or not. I believe it helps, but I understand there are arguments that, you know, going the other way. So I think while we're here as well, I think on the reliability and performance question, I think users who are doing coinjoin, so for example, if you're doing Samurai, Whirlpool, one of the interesting implications there is that your wallet will be se-searching quite deeply into the HD hierarchical deterministic wallet, and then- That, that lookup can be more challenging on a Raspberry Pi. So do you wanna just elaborate on any of your experiences there?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "17:47", "start": 1066.58, "text": "Yeah, so I think w-when it comes to, it, it comes down to the Electrum server that you are in, that you are querying against. Now, for most people, I think the Electrum Rasp server is probably fine for most people, but if you are continuously mixing, for months and years, as opposed to, you know, doing the usual, you know, five mixes, send to cold storage, that type of deal, Electrum Rust server will probably, you know, that'll meet your needs more than enough, yeah. More than enough. But if you are continuously mixing for years and years, and you've gone down that keychain, say, you know, you're at the six thousandth address or something like that, then, you know, I, I know guys who have tried to import that wallet on a Electrum Rust server backend, and it just simply doesn't work. Y- there's no amount of system resources that actually pulls that through. and so you need to end up on an Electrum And so that's kind of, yeah, there are a lot more, I guess, trade-offs with that. the, the Fulcrum server obviously has a lot of disk usage, space requirements, whereas the Electrum-Rust server doesn't. And so it, it really depends on, you know, how far deep into your wallet you're, you're gonna go and whether you need that Electrum-Rust server or you need the Fulcrum server. So it really doesn't matter too much. Like, I, I know Craig, Raw from the Sparrow he did some fantastic research using Raspberry Pis as his, you know, standard, and he's come out with, mate, the Fulcrum server just absolutely rips through. that's his, you know, base conclusion there. but I would strongly recommend that you read through the pros and cons of each of these methods, and he uses the, you know, the Raspberry Pi as a basis for that. Now, obviously, he, he, you know, he, he, he optimizes as much as he possibly can, but whether that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:41", "start": 1180.56, "text": "You know? Right. Yeah. And as I, as I recall from that, and I'll, I'll, I'll get the, blog post and put that in as well for anyone who wants to see his, blog post comparing Electrum X, Electras, or Electrum Resserver and Fulcrum. And I, as I recall, I think the trade-off came out that Fulcrum was kind of generally better, but one of the ne-negative trade-offs is it took a little bit more time on that initial setup, and I think it requires a little bit" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "20:10", "start": 1210.36, "text": "Yeah, that's right. So the initial, when you import that, I guess, public key into, like, when you look it up for the first time, that's where it takes a little bit more, grunt, and then after that though, subsequent, it's just bang, bang, bang, even for wallets that are, you know, six thousand deep into the keychain." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:27", "start": 1227.27, "text": "Yeah, that's, that's an interesting implication for people out there. And the other imp- interesting point here, so let's say, you know, there's only so many people who are willing to run" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:40", "start": 1240.04, "text": "Matt O'Dell says there's the Uncle Jim model. And so if you wanna be an Uncle Jim, using one of these Raspberry Pis may not be a good thing, right? Because in the same way the performance aspect is so poor on a Raspberry Pi compared to, let's say, the ThinkPad or the Dell Optiplex or, you know, your proper full-blown desktop PC, that the performance gap is gonna be really noticeable if you're trying to be an Uncle Jim for your community, your family, your friends, and you're saying, \"Hey, instead of you using somebody else's server Just a refresh for listeners who are new. Let's say you run your Bitcoin full node, and that could be using Raspberry Pi, Blitz, Umbrel, Ronin Dojo, any of the, well, or MyNode, or any of these other ones. And so the idea is you can run the infrastructure, you can run the Bitcoin Core node, and you can run the Electrum server or Fulcrum, and then the idea is your family or friends can just use, for example, Sparrow Wallet or Electrum Wallet and connect through to your server. And so what we're talking about here is You need your server to be performant, i.e. efficient and actually get, get the job done. And reliable. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "21:45", "start": 1305.36, "text": "And reliable, because what if your, one of your clients wants to search up at one o'clock in the morning, and one o'clock in the morning you're asleep and the node's dead, right? It needs to also be reliable. So you need that uptime, you need that, you know, capability to be actually online twenty-four seven so that wh- whoever wants to index or wh- whoever wants to query what is in their wallet are able to do so. Yeah, that, that's another consideration. It's the, it's the reliability of it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:14", "start": 1334.14, "text": "Right, yeah. And so just for listeners, again, just, just to make sure everyone's following along, so the idea there is, let's say you are using Sparrow Wallet or Electrum Wallet or one of these others, and you're calling out to somebody else's node. So what it's doing there is it's calling out to somebody else's node to feed it its history, transaction history, and its balance, and you are also, you are using it to broadcast transactions. And so if, Bitcoin full running, full node running pleb has a Raspberry Pi and then that your, your nephew or niece in the Bitcoin model is trying to call out to your server and it's offline at that time or it's really slow because so many people are hitting it at the same time or because it's just not a very performant device, then your clients are gonna have a, you know, your, your nephews and nieces in the Bitcoin sense are going to really suffer because they're gonna have a bad user experience and they'll be like, \"Oh, this, you know, it's a pain, They'll be saying. And so I think while, let's say K3tan and I, you and I, we've been, talking about Raspberry Pi nodes, I think it's time to sort of shift the conversation or at least get more people aware about some of the trade-offs here so that people can make an informed choice, because I think what was the case in twenty twenty has now sort of become, I think in twenty twenty two has become, it's time to really start shifting to more reliability, more secure, more performance." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "23:36", "start": 1415.77, "text": "Agree, agree. You've summed it up very, very well" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:40", "start": 1420.3, "text": "As another example as well, in terms of hard drive or s- SSD, solid state drive capacity. So, again, just to explain for listeners, the idea is you are running an operating system on your box, whether that's a Raspberry Pi or whether it's a ThinkPad or an Optiplex or whatever device, and then you might have separately, or even in-built into that device, let's say it's a ThinkPad or an Optiplex, and you've put in a new SSD, that was a common thing where if you buy, as an example, let's say you buy a ref To insert a new solid state drive to make sure it has enough capacity. So I think that's another component that we should just talk through so people understand what's going on there. But the high level of it is that you're storing the blockchain on that device and also the Electrum server you're using, it has some indexing, it might be thirty or fifty gigs worth of data that it's keeping as well. So you've got to consider that too. So, do you wanna just outline that process there of, you know, the process of buying this box or ThinkPad or machine and then upgrading" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "24:41", "start": 1481.04, "text": "Yeah, so basically what you're gonna do is, when you buy these, you know, refurbished computers, they're usually gonna have some small capacity, drive in them, and they'll be like a hundred and twenty-eight gig or something like that just to run Windows or whatever. Now, what we're gonna do, and I, I go through this in the, in the video series, is basically you're gonna take that, hard drive out and replace it with like a one terabyte or a two terabyte SSD. And that basically, I, I prefer Seventy model, that's my preferred method. I think that these, these are workhorses, they're very, they're designed to last a very long time, and so I, I really like those, devices in terms of, their reliability and the, the longevity of them. and so you would swap out the one twenty-eight and you would put in the two terabyte or the one terabyte, and you would install a new operating system on that and off you go. And so that's kind of the, the, the process behind it. It's really just te- a-and it's not technical, it's really, it's just, i-it's kind of like putting in a USB, yeah? Like, you open up the computer, and you plug the USB ca- like, i-i-the connector in. It's, it's called a SATA connection, and you just, you know, slide out the old hard drive and slide the new back in. these computers make it extremely, extremely accessible to be able to do that. and so, yeah, you shouldn't have too many problems. There's lots of It's not the most difficult thing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:13", "start": 1573.4, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Are you interested in improving your Bitcoin security to multi-signature and you're not sure the easy way to do this? Unchained Capital can help you out. They've got a concierge onboarding program, so this can help you smooth over that process of going up to multi-signature. Now, Unchained Capital can help you create this setup where you hold two keys in different locations and they hold one key. Now, they can ship you the hardware if you need that, they can do a video call with you. You and guide you through this process and even help you with withdrawing your keys from the exchanges. So this is a great way to get started or to improve your security if you're already on single signature. So when you're in multi-signature, you can give yourself that peace of mind that you have additional security. So you can go and get that over at unchained dot com slash concierge, use code livera for a discount. Those of you interested in Bitcoin mining, you've got to check out brains dot com, that's brains with two eyes. Now the brains team recently put out a Bitcoin Bitcoin Mining Book by Daniel Fromkin and with contributions from other people. So I'll be chatting with Daniel soon, so make sure you check out that book and look, look out for it. I met some of the guys over in Austin at Bitblock Boom and also some of the guys over again in Baltic Honey Badger. So if you're interested in Bitcoin mining, you've got to check out Brains dot com. They've got an analytics page with all kinds of insights that you can find, as well as a mining profitability calculator. Now they've got Brains OS Plus, so if you're doing Bitcoin For Brains OS Plus, because you can improve your efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. That's all available over at brains dot com. And for those of you focused on Bitcoin hardware security, CoinKite dot com is the website. They offer the Coldcard, which is my favorite Bitcoin hardware signing device. And remember, we're moving to that new term, hardware signing device. So the Coldcard can hold your private keys and it can sign your Bitcoin transactions. And there's all kinds of different configurations you can use. You can just use it in single signature mode, directly plugged to a computer. You can use it, not plugged to your computer, and just plugged into the power, to the wall, and using a micro SD card, and you can also use it as part of a multi-signature setup. It's just such a versatile device, and it's just really reliable, so I think that's why it's one of the favorites in the space. It is my favorite. You can go and get yours over at coinkite dot com and use the code Livera when you're ordering your cold cards. You might need to get some for yourself and some for your friends who you're helping onboard Yeah, right. And there are tutorials online about all these kinds of things, right? If you search on YouTube or whatever, you can search \"how to upgrade SSD in this laptop,\" and you'll find some guy who's showing you, \"Oh, yeah, here's how you unscrew the laptop screws,\" and then you, you know, it's, it's not that hard. So don't be afraid, listeners, you can, you can do it, and it's cost-effective, right? So I'll give you a quick example. So I think probably the sweet spot in terms of Even the Samsung QV-QVO1, the two terabyte is about a hundred and fifty USD. Now, if you wanna really step it up, they've got a four terabyte for three fifty, but I think two terabyte is probably the sweet spot for now, because the reason-- the reason I say that is if you just do a one terabyte, you might run out of space in, you know, a few years' time, whereas a two terabyte is probably a little bit more future-proofed, and it's not that much more. So it's kind of like, I think that umbrella with the default Bitcoin plus Electrum, right? The Electrum raw server plus Core Lightning. Now, to be clear, on this setup, I hadn't set up any channels on it yet, but, but the current setup as of today was about five hundred and ninety-six gigabytes. So, you know, and if we're assuming, let's say, on an assumption of one point five megabytes per block, that's two hundred and sixteen megs a day or one point five gigs per week or about seventy-eight gigs per year. So, for example, that setup I did, if there" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:08", "start": 1808.1, "text": "So before that node is really gonna start hitting into issues like running out of space, and then we're gonna have to do that whole rollover process. Whereas if I had set that up with a two terabyte, there's much more longevity there. So a-and I think it also matters what you're doing, right? If you're gonna do Lightning, there may be a channel database, there may be routing data that your node has to be able to use. And I think especially for those of us in the node running community, and we see ourselves as Uncle Jim, we're trying to help onboard our family Say using, like if you've got LND hub for Blue Wallet or if you've got, BTC Pay Server has a new one called LN Bank, which is out, out in experimental mode, and you can onboard your Bitcoin nephews and nieces onto your Lightning server, if you will. So these are all things to consider around hard drive space and SSD. so a-anything else you wanted to add there around hard drive space or SSD capacity and cost?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "31:03", "start": 1862.92, "text": "Yeah. So the other thing is you need to also factor in not just the Bitcoin core that's going up every ten minutes It's also the Electrum server that's also going up every ten minutes, so it's, it's, it's a double whammy, and depending on which server you have, an Electrum, Rust server is a little bit more, less gigs, it's about thirty, thirty-five gigabytes, whereas the Fulcrum server is like a hundred and something gigabytes right now. So that's the, the level of difference in, in how much capacity you need. So, you know, if you're using, a Fulcrum server, you're gonna be, you whereas a two terabyte would give you a little bit more, m-more room in, in, in that regard." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:44", "start": 1903.52, "text": "Right. Yeah. And so these are all very important things to think about. and then in terms of, obviously, there's different ways to run that Bitcoin node as well, right? So you can use Umbrel, you can use Raspberry Pi, you can use some of these different ones, and some of them have a, like a PC, version, or they've got a PC image as well. Or of course, you can use, you know Your thoughts there on, I guess, those users. So imagine the listener today, they've got just a Raspberry Pi node. Let's say they've got an Umbrel or a, you know, something similar or a Raspberry Blit. What's the process gonna be like if they try to now do this on a laptop or an Optiplex instead of on a Raspberry Pi?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "32:25", "start": 1944.95, "text": "Yeah, so it really just depends on going through the documentation of each, of their systems. So some guys will probably not have a, a, an image at all, for, a desktop PC. An image, like I know, for example, Umbrel, you can import a, e-the image into a, a piece of software called VirtualBox. Same thing with MyNode, you can import it into VirtualBox, and you'd be able to, run that, Bitcoin node or, or that graphical inter-or that whole interface, as a separate computer within your existing PC, so for example, a laptop. and so you get that same image, and you fire it up on VirtualBox, and I've got- A video, tutorial on that as well on, on the, on the channel. And so you fire it up and on your computer, boom, you've got a min node instance ready to go and you can start clicking as if you were using a Raspberry Pi, but you're actually just using your, your normal computer. now obviously you'll also need to make sure that you have a give, give your computer access to a one terabyte disk at the minimum, and then it'll detect that and it'll, it'll just sort of put all the blockchain data into, into that disk," }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "33:38", "start": 2018.36, "text": "so that's what the image does, and that can be done. I'm pretty sure Umbrel can also be run on a PC as well, so there's some dis-in-instructions on how to get that going in a Docker, image, and so you can, you know, follow some instructions and, and get that going onto your, on your computer as well. So those are some other options for getting off the Raspberry Pi and onto the, the PC image. Having said that though, I, I know that the Umbrel guys don't actually fully support" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "34:08", "start": 2048.12, "text": "Fully support the PC version, those sorts of things. So those are just some things to, to, to think about as well. Yeah. And then obviously the, the, the Ministry of Nodes guides take you, you know, there is no, trusted third party whatsoever, it's just you, the command line, and you sit there and you do it yourself, and I teach you how to do it. so I, I think that's important. I think it's important to just- Be in a position where Bitcoin is always, you just down-- as a user, you're able to download it yourself, you're able to verify yourself, you're able to install it yourself, you're able to configure it yourself, and you're able to run it yourself and maintain it. I think that's an important skill that at least some of us who are, you know, intellectually curious about running these nodes and getting into computers and getting into Linux commands and those sorts of things, they should be doing that. I think that that's really important for just the decentralization of the," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:56", "start": 2095.62, "text": "of the The question I think maybe some listeners might hit into this, and I, you know, even in my earlier days playing around with some of this stuff, I hit into some of this as well, where if I had a smaller hard drive for my operating system and a bigger hard drive for my blockchain data, and then sometimes I would try to run some of these guides and then it would screw up permission" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "35:15", "start": 2114.78, "text": "errors and, yeah, dude, like this is why I recommend a one single drive to, to rule them all, have the operating system and the blockchain on the same disk. And the reason that I say that is you end up getting these permission errors, things just don't quite, you know, work as well. You have to change configuration, locations. It's just, it, it is a wild mess, a-and it's just not the stock standard way of doing it. I reckon if you're gonna do this, just take one drive, get a bigger drive, and, and install the operating system on that, and, install the blockchain data onto that one drive. and then when it comes time to upgrade that drive, you can- Actually take, you can basically clone the drive. So say for example, you need to go from two terabytes to four terabytes, what you do is you can clone the two terabyte into the four terabyte, and now you've got free space of an additional two terabytes, and so it just increases the disk space of that drive, and then you whack that back into your computer, and now you've got four terabytes, so you just start from where you left off." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:21", "start": 2181.1, "text": "Yeah, and I think these are things that we as a Bitcoin community of, of, people who Advocate, whatever you wanna call this, I think these are things that we all have to think about and try to up and increase our technical skill. I think it's important for all of us. Of course, no one's perfect, but we have to minimize lapping and try to, you know, everyone has to try to push each other to do better on these things. So I think, you know, it's useful, information for all of us. So when it comes to self-hosting as well, what we've seen with some of the, I guess, the way some of the When perhaps, maybe the longer term pathway is to try to do this using PC images or having at least a PC runnable command that then fetches all the, the right things. or of course, in your case, if, if we're doing the Ministry of Nodes node box guide, then, you know, you already have to, you're already doing that anyway, you're having to learn that part. Also, we're also seeing this conversation go broader into this idea of the personal self computer, you know, self-hosting. So this idea that we should self-host our- Our, not just our Bitcoin node, but we should self-host our media, our pictures, our Nextcloud or things like this. Now, I suppose it's also probably a good spot to mention that people should remember to have segregation here. So do you wanna just explain why should people segregate between their Bitcoin applications and the non-Bitcoin ones?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "37:49", "start": 2268.66, "text": "Yeah, so this is a, a great question that I see, a, a fair bit, and I think, yeah, we're seeing, you know, packages now that, you know, do both I think that, that there probably is worthwhile doing something, in terms of segregating those two functions out, and the reason is, is because the wear and tear on system resources, you know, Bitcoin just in itself uses a fe- like when it's, in the initial blockchain download mode, as well as when it's in the, e-electrum indexing mode, it uses system resources. and you've got an SSD that's being used, that's growing constantly. You've got RAM that's being used, you've got CPU that's being shared. the wear and tear to add an additional thing is going to somewhat impact the longevity of your Bitcoin node. And so that's- That's why I'm not really an advocate of, putting too many things on that Bitcoin node. This is a Bitcoin node. This is your critical banking infrastructure that you are trying to keep for online reliable and up all the time, twenty-four seven, and out into the future, right? You're, you're doing this, this, this is a project that you do today that you reap the rewards for for a very, very long time, okay? Now, to put like your next cloud and other devices on there which use up those system resources, I think it's probably- Probably better if you just segregate those two physically in terms of h-hardware, right? Don't mix and match those two things up, is my recommendation. Now, the other thing is, is if you need to, say for example, you've done something on the next cloud and you just need to reboot, just for those, you know, that process to take place, right? So, you know, something's gone and you need to upgrade and now you need to reboot. So then, when you reboot the next cloud, well, actually, if you're sharing the Now you have to reboot the, the Bitcoin node, so that's downtime for your Bitcoin node. So in that regard, if you're, you know, playing around with other software on this end and it needs a reboot, well, you're gonna have to reboot the Bitcoin node as well, and it's just, it's not ideal to be doing that. keep your Bitcoin node online for as long as you possibly can in the context of running a, you know, a, a server or a, an Electrum server and those sorts of things. You don't want to, you know, Keep that, yeah, try and maximize as much uptime of your Bitcoin nodes as, as you can. And then the other thing is that when you're playing around with these other pieces of software, you know, you're, you're tinkering with things, and as you, you will find with self-hosting information, you will make mistakes. I'm not gonna lie, it's not all rosy out there. Things do go wrong in computing, and if you have that same machine that goes wrong again, that's just, it's, it's one more thing that you're thinking about, whereas if Bitcoin node and you've just parked it in one place and you do your experiments on this base and, you know, you, you play around and you, you, you, you find what's best for you in terms of your self-hosting software It's better that you just have that peace of mind to say, okay, well, that side, the, the Bitcoin node side, is a-okay, and I'm able to muck around as much as I want with the self-hosting stuff on this side, and it'll be fine. And, you know, the two will never meet. And so there's also possible security benefits of doing that as well, like you don't want, you know, potentially, some sort of malware or something to infect that PC, and then go out to various other devices on your There is probably some, worthwhile, networking, controls that you can put into place as well on a, on a, on a particular device to say, \"All right, well, I don't want anyone else being able to access this node except for this computer.\" And so you, you're minimizing the attack surface to your Bitcoin node, whereas the next cloud, you, you might want other computers to, to access, the next cloud server. So, you know, you can really start to hone in or dial in In on what you're, you want your network to do when there's a physical segregation there. So I think that that's probably something that's worthwhile, considering is to have a separate, I guess, PC or a, a, a separate computer to do your self-hosting stuff, which is now becoming more and more popular. you know, people are running their next clouds, people are running their own PhotoPrism, and, there's a whole bunch of applications now, people are doing their also their Vaultwarden, so their, their, their, Listing that, that it's a huge space, where, you know, you can get into some really cool applications, but they're just not Bitcoin related, so just put them onto the side." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:31", "start": 2551.35, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And so, I mean, and that's not to say you, you shouldn't install any of these, I mean, it could just be that, let's say, you have an Umbrel or a Startnine, but you have a secondary one that does your photos and your, your Vaultwarden and your other things, and you have one that you do just Bitcoin stuff on" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:51", "start": 2570.72, "text": "If you can't aff- if you literally can't afford it, well, okay, fine. But if it's kind of a case where, you know, you can have-- if you can, like we said, if you can outlay, your initial outlay might be three hundred USD, something in that range, or maybe four hundred, for a laptop and the SSD or a, or an Optiplex and the SSD, then you're-- like, that's already basically in the same price ballpark as the Raspberry Pi models, anyway. So it might make sense to do it that way. So, Maybe hit us with some of your highlights. What are some of the highlights for self-hosting like non-Bitcoin things? What kind of applications are there that people should consider? And I know you did a blog post about this recently, so I'll include that as well, the, My Home Lab post." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "43:34", "start": 2613.81, "text": "Yeah. So I, I, I've, I've been going down the journey of, you know, self-hosting my data. I wanna get rid of Google. I wanna de-Googol, and I wanna get rid of Apple, and I wanna get rid" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "43:50", "start": 2629.6, "text": "of As to who sees it, who has access to it. You all have seen recently that a gentleman took a photo of his, kids groin area and sent it to his doctor, and that got uploaded to Google Cloud, and Google cl- Google came in and said, \"Well, this is, this is child porn,\" and shut his, shut his, account down, and he still hasn't got it back yet. And so that's ten years worth of data and photos and everything else that he has absolutely no access to. It is beyond ridiculous. Ridiculous. So in that instance, people are, are starting to wake up and go, \"Hold on, well, if, if they can shut me down, you know, if, if Google can shut me down f-from accessing my own photos, well, then maybe it's time for me to take ownership of my own photos. And how best can I run my own Google Photos? \" so that's one, the, the self-hosted al-alternatives for doing that. There's now self-hosted, for, for your own data You know, who you conduct business with and those sorts of things. So you might want to self-host the, the phone numbers that you, that of your contacts. So those types of things, can be done via Nextcloud. And of, of course, as I mentioned, there's Vaultwarden for, you know, it's a fork of Bitwarden, but it's easily self-hostable, where, you know, you, you, you run your own password manager. So in the event that Bitwarden servers go down, you won't be affected" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "45:21", "start": 2720.94, "text": "Media servers, Jellyfin, where you can, you know, do, you know, watch videos and all those sorts of things. And, yeah, there's so much that you can self-host, RSS feeds. so instead of going out and getting a, you know, going out to various websites, you can just get updates via RSS feeds. And your RSS feed, you can have a server that maintains it and all of your clients, what you've read and what you haven't read, that can all be synchronized. There's so, there's so many Hosting. but the important thing is when you start off, just to give some tips, I guess, is when you start off using these free and open source alternatives, I would actually give yourself a process of two years to really wean yourself off, because, let's face it, we've all been on Google for at least, at least a decade, people, if not longer, and you're not gonna wean off them in tomorrow, right? You're not gonna wean off them completely within the next week. Try self-hosting. hosting yourself, see what the issues are for about a year or two, and then when you're comfortable, have them on both, right? So have them on your Google Drive and have them on your, on your own self-hosted thing. If you think that you don't need that Google Drive anymore and you're using less and less and less, that's the time when you should start to delete. So run them in parallel at the same time, and then when you're done with the proprietary, you know, application, wean yourself off slowly and then completely shut it down. But don't do the thing where you think, okay, well, I've got my next cloud now, I've got this now, it's all good, I'm gonna transfer all my data, I'm gonna shut down my Google account, and I'm gonna shut In, you know, a month's time, you'll be like, \"W-w-what just happened to my data? I up- I hit the upgrade button and it's all gone. What the hell? \" Do you know what I mean? You will find these issues as you come along with the, open source software, and you need at least two years' worth of experience to be able to go, \"Okay, well, you know what? I've got a handle on things, I can maintain it, I know what's going on, I know how it's used, and now" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "47:33", "start": 2852.59, "text": "yeah, so I, I know I've gone a bit, yeah, no, that's, that's good. I think it's useful to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:37", "start": 2856.6, "text": "have, like, I think it's useful context just for people to be aware what's possible out there, right? And it's not saying it's the hunky dory, everything's great. I mean, there will be certain trade-offs, right? So as an example, there may be certain features that are just not available in the FOS, so FOS, free open-source software, in the FOS alternatives, but you are getting additional" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:02", "start": 2882.05, "text": "You know, additional space on Google Drive or Dropbox or Apple Cloud or one of these, and so, you know, there are some benefits there, and, you know, more, as more and more people get canceled, more and more people have to actually start looking at these things out of necessity, not just intellectual interest, you know? And so, I think this is something that, we as the Bitcoin community or communities, whatever you wanna call us, w-we have to think about this as well, and I think it's also one of those things where there will be times where it's And completely shut down, right? Like if you get-- like for example, that guy who got totally shut down out of his Google Drive, like he just, you know, he's just completely screwed. Whereas if he, it would-- if he had this alternative setup, yes, it would be inconvenient at the start, but at least he has an alternative and it's ready to go. So it's kind of like how, you know, in, people talk about even with like flag theory and stuff like that of, you know, trying to have a plan B, whether that's a plan B And be set up and ready to go so that you're ready to kind of roll over if you do get cancelled or something goes wrong in the, mainstream world that you have your digital self-sovereign, so-self-sovereign alternative there to go." }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "49:14", "start": 2954.5, "text": "Yeah, definitely. And I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. I know guys who are developing, you know, more peer-to-peer based, tools that will allow, you know, better backups, better reliability, decentralized data, those sorts of things. There is software that's coming out and that's being, you know, implemented, and it, you know, hopefully it'll be free and open source soon and those sorts of things. And I'm, I'm looking forward to seeing what, developers are building to help us with our own digital self-sovereignty. And I think that that's, that's great to see, and I'm looking forward to, to experimenting with that software and, you know, seeing how it can help and benefit us as we move into this, you know, cancel culture, as you say." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:56", "start": 2995.73, "text": "Yeah. Alright, well, I think that In the show notes, but make sure you check out ministryofnodes dot com dot au. That's where, that's the professional service where K3tan will help you. You can basically do a call with him and pay him afterwards, and it's, you know, it's kind of like a value for value model. And of course, k3t a n dot com, which is his personal blog, and of course, I'll link that as well. You can find a bunch of this stuff there. The My Home Lab is a great blog post I recommend for people to check it out. There Like just start with something basic, and you, you might find that over time it's actually getting better and better and easier, and you're more familiar with it. So that's probably the final tip from my side. Any final tips, you know, for the listeners out there, K3tan?" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "50:44", "start": 3044.38, "text": "Yeah, no, I think you've, you've nailed it. Just get started, do something. something is better than nothing. Whether that's, you know, just moving over to using a new, a, a password manager like Bitwarden or just opening up a" }, { "speaker": "my_longtime_friend", "time": "51:00", "start": 3059.85, "text": "Pro I think that's a great place to start. Just do something, get started, get involved." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:06", "start": 3066.5, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, alright guys, so that's it. Thank you, Katan. Thanks for having me. Cheers. So let me know what you think about Katan's insights around Bitcoin nodes. Should you be using them on Raspberry Pis or should you be using something else? Let me know what you think. And of course, we spoke about a lot of different things, so the show notes are available over at stephanilivera dot com slash four one one. Thanks for listening," } ] }