RaspiBlitz

I came across this project yesterday and decided to give it a try on my Raspberry Pi 5 with 2 TB SSD (my Pi 4 only has a 1 TB SSD and down to 96 GB free). Consequently, I’ve been running a Bitcoin Node on a Raspberry Pi since the Pi 2, and I’ve migrated to the next Pi as they’ve been released. And I’ve always manually installed everything, though there were helpful guides that were created with a very good one being RaspiBolt. But RaspiBlitz is an image you can put on a 32 GB microSD card which is setup with a lot of scripts and menus to make the whole installation, setup and management of a Bitcoin and Lightning node incredibly easy. And the microSD card is setup to recognize and use a USB 3.0 SSD drive which will store your blockchain data, as the Bitcon blockchain is almost 700 GB (so preferably a 2 TB drive or greater). And through the menu system you can add many other additional projects as well as having a very nice web interface for managing your node. And the project even has support for a cheap screen you can add to the top of your Raspberry Pi to see your node’s status.

Below is a screenshot where I have three terminals up with Gnu Screen, one running “watch bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo”, one “watch bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo” along with the standard display when you SSH into the machine currently showing that’s it’s still downloading the blockchain.

And this is the status screen if you choose to use the attached screen, or access it from the menu.

And the menu system is very good.

And the menu system makes adding extra services very easy.

And the whole project is open source and on Gihub. So after this completes the blockchain download and LND sync I’ll add some of the extra applications I use and try out some additional ones as well as examining the scripts. But so far, it’s a very promising project that makes running your own Bitcoin node extremely easy. And running your own node means you can use Bitcoin in privacy, especially using phone SPV wallets that access only your node for transaction queries and sending of transactions. And your desktop wallet software using hardware wallets can access only your own node as well, not bleeding any information to other nodes of which I’d be concerned for government run nodes looking to unravel your privacy as they have a huge operation trying to track transactions and who addresses belong to.

More to come.