A new full node is born.

Hi everybody,

I am happy to report that a new Bitcoin & Lightning full node is now up and running to support the network.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a few months but I didn’t have a spare device to use for this specific purpose and honestly I was not even sure what to use. Raspberry Pi with Umbrel looked like the best option for ease of installation and use but supply chain shortages and price hikes made me wait a bit more and look for better deals.

Long story short, I didn’t buy a Raspberry Pi and I didn’t use Umbrel.

Here are the details about my Bitcoin & Lightning full node:

HARDWARE

Beelink U59 Pro mini PC.

It was on sale on Amazon, I got it for € 245,00. Comes with a single 8 GB RAM stick and a 512GB M.2 SATA SSD which is basically the boot drive with the operating system and all the applications. I maxed out the RAM at 16GB with two sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2933MHz which were on sale as well and cost me € 30,00. The U59 Pro has room for a second 2.5” SATA drive so I installed a Crucial MX500 2TB SATA SSD that I had laying around and that’s where the Bitcoin blockchain and the Fulcrum database are stored.

OPERATING SYSTEM

Ubuntu MATE 22.04.2 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.

I performed a minimal installation. I am not super proficient with the terminal so I opted for MATE as it’s a fork of the old Gnome 2 desktop environment which is my favorite. A bit of eye candy doesn’t hurt, I guess.

BITCOIN & LIGHTNING STACK

• Bitcoin Core v24.0.1
• Fulcrum Electrum Server v1.9.1
• JoinMarket v0.9.9
• Jam for JoinMarket v0.1.5
• Mempool v2.5.0
• Lightning Network Daemon v0.16.0-beta
• Lightning Terminal (LiT) v0.9.0-alpha
• Ride The Lightning v0.13.6-beta
• Boltz Exchange v1.2.7-862ab4a
• Thunderhub v0.13.18

It’s been a great learning experience so far. Two days ago I didn’t even know how to clone a GitHub repository and now everything is working as expected. I still need to learn a lot more especially on coinjoins and Lightning in general but I am really happy with what I’ve achieved so far.

The main sources of information to build my full node are Ministry Of Nodes’ video tutorials on YouTube and the incredible RaspiBolt guide. Both have been very useful to get me started in this beautiful project, but I faced some issues every now and then due to the fact that I was dealing with newer versions of the apps and things didn’t work out of the box all the time so I had to RTFM here and there.

Do I regret not going with Umbrel? Yes.

Was this all worth it tho? YES²⁵⁶.

Please consider running a node. Take care.