Bitcoin Full Node Setup

You will need:

• Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB Memory, at least 32GB micro SD storage)
• Official Rpi Power brick
• Ethernet cord (optional but recommended)
• Minimum 1TB external drive (for storing the blockchain)
• Non metered internet connection

Link parts needed

OS

We need an OS, and the best one that I could think of is the official OS developed by the people who make the Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi OS Docs Raspberry Pi Imager is the recommended way to install Raspberry Pi OS.

sudo apt install rpi-imager

I recommend installing the Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) for now you can find that in the other section.

When installing you will also have the option to configure a few settings when clicking the gear in the bottom right.

I recommend at least checking the box to automatically enable ssh.

Make sure you have your SD card inserted into the computer, and when you're ready click the write button and wait for the OS to install.

Interacting with the Pi

You can use the Pi same as any other computer, so if you want to just plugin a mouse, keyboard and monitor that's an option. If you do things this way you will have access to graphical various tools.

Another option is to ssh into the Pi from another computer. Which is what I will be doing and this tutorial will assume you are doing everything via SSH. You can obviously still easily follow along with your graphical interface by just opening up a terminal.

SSH into rpi

prereqs

• inetutils
• nmap

From your host computer:

$ hostname -i
192.168.1.102

Now use nmap to ping and scan your whole subnet range

NOTE (I'm just showing the rpi address you'll likely see many other devices returned)

NOTE (make sure to run this with sudo to see the associated name)

$sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24
MAC Address: E4:5F:01:5E:25:72 (Raspberry Pi Trading)
Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.57
Host is up (0.00016s latency).

Now you can ssh into your rpi

NOTE (make sure to change pi to whatever your username is)

ssh [email protected]

Format external Drive

To find the drive enter the following:

sudo fdisk -l

You should see something like:

Device     Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1   2048 3907028991 3907026944  1.8T Linux filesystem

You will know it's the right drive because the Size should be much larger than the micro SD card. Also take note of /dev/sda1/ this tells us that we will be targeting /dev/sda when we go to format that drive.

We can now begin formatting the drive using fdisk:

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

You can press m to get help understanding the different operations available.

We will do the following:

• g: create a new empty GPT partition table

• n: add a new partition (press Enter to proceed with using the whole drive)

• y: confirm and remove signature (NOTE this may not be necessary if there is no signature to remove)

• w: write table to disk and exit

Running sudo fdisk -l will show your new partition

Now we can build our file system with:

sudo mkfs.exfat /dev/sda1

Mounting USB External Drive

We will now need to mount the drive and also make sure it automatically mounts when we reboot. We'll also change the permissions to allow the user read, write and execute access.

NOTE change pi to your username

sudo mkdir /mnt/bitcoin

sudo chown -R pi:pi /mnt/bitcoin # change pi to your username

sudo chmod -R 775 /mnt/bitcoin

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/bitcoin

Set all future permissions for the mount point to pi user and group:

sudo setfacl -Rdm g:pi:rwx /mnt/bitcoin
sudo setfacl -Rm g:pi:rwx /mnt/bitcoin

NOTE: the above may fail, just move on with the installation since this may not be necessary anyway

We don't want to have to mount our drive every time we reboot so we'll be adding an entry to the fstab file so our OS knows to mount the drive on boot.

First get the UUID id:

sudo blkid | grep sda1

NOTE if you have other drives installed this may be sdb1 or sbc1 etc..

You should see an output that looks like:

/dev/sda1: UUID="XXXX-XXXX" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="exfat" PTTYPE="dos" PARTUUID="XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX"

We are only interested in the line that starts with /dev/sda1

We can add that line to the fstab by opening the fstab file with vim or nano and adding the following line to the bottom, make sure to change the UUID to the one generated by the blkid command from earlier

vim /etc/fstab

UUID=XXXX-XXXX  /mnt/bitcoin exfat   nofail,uid=pi,gid=pi   0   0

After you reboot your node the drive should be mounted to /mnt/bitcoin

Install Bitcoin Core

TODO: explain what bitcoin core is

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git 

TODO: checkout stable version

Install Berkeley DB

For backwards compatibility we will need to install and older version of Berkeley DB. Fortunately there is a script provided in the contrib folder, which we can use to install this version of BDB.

./contrib/install_db4.sh

Install Dependencies

All of the dependencies can be found in the build-unix.md file located in the docs folder, for more information make sure to read that.

• Build requirements:

sudo apt install build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config bsdmainutils

sudo apt install libevent-dev libboost-dev libboost-test-dev

• Install SQLite for descriptor wallet

sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev

• Optional port mapping libraries:

sudo apt install libminiupnpc-dev libnatpmp-dev

• ZMQ dependencies, used to get events out of the daemon (useful for things like block explorers):

sudo apt-get install libzmq3-dev

• User-Space, Statically Defined Tracing (USDT) dependencies:

sudo apt install systemtap-sdt-dev

• GUI dependencies (if you installed your RpiOS with a Desktop):

NOTE To build without GUI pass --without-gui

sudo apt-get install libqt5gui5 libqt5core5a libqt5dbus5 qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools

• For QR Code Support:

sudo apt-get install libqrencode-dev

Generate Build Scripts

Now we should be able to generate the build scripts, if you missed any dependencies you should be able to catch them here:

./autogen.sh

Configure:

NOTE The extra arguments are needed since we are using Berkeley DB.

export BDB_PREFIX='/home/pi/Repos/bitcoin/db4'

./configure BDB_LIBS="-L${BDB_PREFIX}/lib -ldb_cxx-4.8" BDB_CFLAGS="-I${BDB_PREFIX}/include"

Compile & Install

• Compile (This could take about an hour):

make

• Install

sudo make install

This will place the binaries in /usr/local/bin

/usr/local/bin/bitcoind

/usr/local/bin/bitcoin-cli

Start and Run your Bitcoin Core Node

TODO: talk about bitcoin core vs node

Configuration

• Let's create a config file for bitcoind

touch ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

• Add the following to your config

rpcuser=pi
rpcpassword=CHANGE_THIS
maxconnections=15
datadir=/mnt/bitcoin
txindex=1

TODO: Explain these options

• To find more config options checkout:

bitcoind --help

Tor (Optional)

Running bitcoind

bitcoind -conf=/home/pi/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf -daemon

Stopping bitcoind

bitcoin-cli stop

This will start your bitcoin node and begin downloading the entire blockchain into the /mnt/bitcoin directory

References

• Raspberry Pi Guide

• Mastering Bitcoin

TODO: check out tor setup

• Tor setup