So, I admit, I was a bit late in the game regarding Bitcoin. Or more than a little actually. Sure, I’ve read a bit about it, but I never really got into it. Until a few months ago, when I had lunch with a former colleague who is very much into Bitcoin. We met up for lunch at Epicenter. I had a sandwich, minderal water, and I tried out the first Bitcoin ATM in Stockholm. Since then I have been spending a lot of time reading up on Bitcoin.
Now I’ve decided I must try to setup my own full Bitcoin node. It seems like good fun, and also the adult, responsible thing to do.
I wanted to go pretty minimal, while still being reasonably simple to setup. So I opted for a Raspberry Pi 2 with Arch.
As I started out, I thought that I would be able to make the world a wonderful service by documenting my endeavor. Turns out I only had to follow the instructions for installing Arch, installing bitcoind and bitcoin-cli from packages, and then following the instructions at bitcoin.org for setting up a full node (granted, I should probably have built from source myself, to be on the safe side). It’s not the fastest node in the network, but hey, it’s cheap and simple, and thus far looks like a great way to get started.
I have not yet opened up my node for incoming traffic, as I am waiting for the blockchain to synchronize.