The oldest post in my blog is a book review. What is this book about? Bitcoin! Despite this fact, I’m not an expert in Bitcoin. I love the ideas behind it, but I never read its source code nor that I follow any of the latest developments in this scene. Some of my friends tried Bitcoin mining. It didn’t end well, as far as I know. Some entertained this idea but didn’t act on it for various reasons.

It always made me feel a bit guilty. I mean, if I’m excited about Bitcoin, shouldn’t I help this project in one way or another? Words are great, but is it enough to maintain truly decentralized and democratic money?

Some people run their own Bitcoin nodes. I did it for a few months, but it’s pretty expensive to do in the cloud. Blockchain takes a lot of storage space and this space is expensive to rent in the cloud. Using popular cloud services also kind of defeats the purpose of having more Bitcoin nodes. Having more nodes can make Bitcoin more secure and decentralized, but imagine a situation when all the bitcoin nodes are hosted on AWS. It takes a single decision of a single company to shut down the whole thing.

These thoughts led me to a conclusion that I should try to run a Bitcoin node from home. It’s easier said than done, because servers need maintenance, and they may also produce a lot of noise and heat. Those constraints prevented me from running my own node, until some person on Mastodon mentioned a project called RaspiBlitz.

In short, RaspiBlitz is an easy to install Bitcoin and Lightning node that can be run on a Raspberry Pi 4. I decided to try it and I must say: it exceeded my expectations. It literally takes a few minutes to set it up and running, and it allowed me to experiment with many new and exciting projects in Bitcoin space.

RaspiBlitz can also run behind Tor. I never used Tor, but now I have a reason to play with it. I think that people who are interested in Bitcoin should have a basic operational knowledge, just in case things go sour with the regulators. It will be our responsibility to support the network and make sure it can resist attacks from various bad actors, including rouge nation states.