01 Installation

What is Bitcoin?

It's the first p2p currency.

transactions
P2P
blocks
miners
blockchain

What is Bitcoin Core?

continuation of the work of Bitcoin's creator
what does it do?
- p2p
- consensus
- wallet
- rpc

Why run a full node?

personal wallet
merchant
API

Specific use case

there's a satoshi square everyday at 33c3
want to use most secure and private wallet available
=> smartphone + ssh + Bitcoin Core

Where do you run it?

not very powerful machine required
but not really raspberry pi either
- ARM: cubox, odroid
4GB of RAM
full blockchain: big harddrive, disk possible
preparing the host (example)
- full disk encryption
- set date
- firewall
- systemd service

How do you get it?

download binary from bitcoin.org
- wget https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.16.0/bitcoin-0.16.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
- wget https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.16.0/SHA256SUMS.asc
- verify signatures with gpg
  - sign my key to get a trust path
- gitian deterministic builds
  - https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gitian.sigs
source code releases on github

Starting up bitcoind

bitcoind is the daemon
connects to peers
downloads and verifies new blocks
- initial block download (IBD)
  - 27h on the-donald
  - on reasonably fast hardware < 8h
relays blocks and transactions

bitcoin-cli

talks to bitcoind using JSON-RPC
- alias bc="bitcoin-cli"
bc -getinfo | egrep "\"version\"|balance|blocks|connections|errors"
bc help
bc help sendtoaddress

bitcoin-qt

GUI
- ?
- I don't use such things

Configuration

the .bitcoin folder
- bitcoin.conf
- blocks/
- cat .bitcoin/debug.log | egrep "receive version message|UpdateTip|Connect total" | tail -n 100
alias bd="bitcoind"
arguments
- bd ... -help
- bd ... -testnet and bc ... -regtest
  - different p2p network and blockchain
- bd ... -debug
- bd ... -dbcache=3000
  - (for faster IBD)

Resources