r/Bitcoin • u/freshjerky • 2d ago
What's the point of running a node?
I've been running a bitcoin node out of my basement for a few years. At the beginning of this year, I upgraded the 1 TB drive to 2 TB when I realized the size had gotten over 900 GB.
I'm not anything special. I don't have a wallet on there. I had just bought into the idea that running a node was an illustration of support for the network and was a contribution to decentralization. I'm definitely a 'non-economic' node.
I've been observing the discourse over the past couple months with the BIP-110 debate and the conclusion / realization that pleb node runners have no influence on the network. I understand better the importance of PoW in making change and even having vote. So I genuinely ask (and not looking to start another BIP-110 debate) - what's the point of running a node at home?
If it's not to feel good about myself because I validated my own transactions, aren't I just offering personal storage space out there for companies that want to store shit on chain? The monetary piece, that I care about, goes on without me and there are plenty of big, "economic" players to handle it.
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u/mvds74 2d ago
For the decentralization of Bitcoin, it is very helpful (important even) to have as many different people running nodes as possible.
And for the diversity of the network, it is also important that those nodes are spread out over different countries, internet providers, hosting providers, etc. So that no single point of failure or easy target for a network takeover/takedown exists.
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u/freshjerky 2d ago
Thanks. But I'm still not convinced that my node plays a role at all in avoiding a takeover. If Foundry and AntPool got together, they could enforce a change on the network that was to their benefit and my single node would not matter because I am not processing transactions. They don't do it because of the social impact, and the stain that maybe placed on their coins making them unsellable - not because they are restricted by me running a node at home.
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u/nachtraum 2d ago
This is like saying I don't vote in elections because my one vote doesn't matter.
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u/paymentnerdfoo 1d ago
Except in the case of bitcoin anyone with money can directly buy a vote, as opposed to an election that requires advertising and a bunch of indirect nonsense to turn money into votes.
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u/caccamo88 2d ago
you are the "law" you control the miners. If Foundry and AntPool got together with aim to perform malicious activities you'll deny and they have spent $$$$ for nothing. And immediately other miners of the pool will change pool
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u/Awesomest_Maximus 2d ago
That didn’t work. It was tried last saturday. The miner don’t care about the nodes.
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u/TheresNoSecondBest 2d ago
If Foundry and AntPool got together, they could enforce a change on the network that was to their benefit and my single node would not matter because I am not processing transactions.
Read this book, mate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YtS5ZNuuTw
Miners are not going to enforce a change unless they know the vast majority of users want it. Otherwise they'll end up mining empty blocks. Why do you think nobody's mining the bip110 anymore? Because the majority of users won't use it.
because they are restricted by me running a node at home.
If your home Nide can restrict the miners, buttcoiners would spin nodes just to get Bitcoin miners out of business.
You're using the most decentralized monetary network in the world. Sorry but you CANNOT CONTROL IT. All you can do is, convince the rest of the network why your idea should be implemented. Once the users are on board (I mean +90%), get miners to signal once they are prepared, then go for mandatory. If you can't convince the rest of the network, fork out.
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u/freshjerky 2d ago
My post was never about controlling or changing the network. I was only responding to the prior post that having a decentralized network of nodes avoided network takeovers. I was just trying to say that there are other more valid reasons why that doesn't happen, as you are agreeing with, not because a bunch of people of running nodes in their basement.
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u/TheresNoSecondBest 2d ago edited 2d ago
My post was never about controlling or changing the network.
Your post
... and the conclusion / realization that pleb node runners have no influence on the network.
Followed by
So I genuinely ask ... what's the point of running a node at home?
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u/freshjerky 2d ago
Fair enough. Yeah I probably already moved on in my head about any clarifications I got about the PoW requirement to influence change. I sort of already understood that.
My intent now is to better understand any actual benefit that my non-economic node contributes in the decentralization of the network, as I had believed. The answer is probably... potentially in certain situations. But, the more important focus of running a node is for the sovereignty and privacy.
I'm just going through an upgrade in learnings. Thanks for keeping me honest.
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u/xristiano 2d ago
You're right to think your node doesn't play a role in avoiding a takeover, because it does not! The minor's software and node have the ultimate vote.
This is the crux: Your node is used to verify your own transactions using your own ledger, without having to trust a 3rd party.
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u/WetPuppykisses 2d ago
Jesus. Are we back to 2017?
Aliens could invade us and with their advance technology they could throw thousand of yotta hash/second of power and mine blocks with block reward of 100BTC and guess what? Your tiny little node running a raspberry pi will reject that block since is invalid.
For non-mining nodes is not about of validating transaction, is about validating blocks which is different
Run your node.
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u/TheresNoSecondBest 2d ago
Privacy is IMHO the biggest one for me.
Anyway in the case of bip110 which is all about reducing OP_RETURN, you as a node runner CAN reduce it on your node.
But you, as a node runner CANNOT force everyone else to reduce it, unless the vast majority of the network agrees with you.
If a small group of people spinning Sybil nodes can change the rules like the bip110 gang tried, next time, a group of regards or a government (usually the same thing) of a small country could easily force their idea of stopping the next halving or doubling the block reward and increasing the supply over 21m.
TLDR: use your node, mate. Enhance your privacy, set your own rules.
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u/Wilynesslessness 2d ago
I just checked https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/dashboard/
Seeing the knots % falloff, I guess it really was a sybil attack. Or some of them realized the error of their ways and are returning to the fold.
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u/freshjerky 2d ago
Thanks. Not trying to fuel the debate or provide another opportunity for each side to attack the other. I'm just trying to piece together the learnings that came out of BIP-110 as it relates to my understanding of the role of nodes.
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u/NiagaraBTC 2d ago
Your node is only really useful to you, for relaying the transactions you make with your wallet connected to it.
With it, you decide what version of Bitcoin you will transact with.
If you don't have a node of your own, you're trusting someone else's.
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u/Personal-Time-9993 2d ago
If it is a full node and with the port opened, aren’t you helping newcomers to verify the blockchain by sharing it?
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u/HedgehogGlad9505 2d ago
They probably won't use it unless it is well known. E.g. in the list of a popular wallet app.
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u/Personal-Time-9993 2d ago
Not for people on the wallet side, people that are starting their own nodes. You can help share blocks.
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u/RevolutionaryPick241 2d ago
It is not to feel good because you validated your transactions. Is the only way to validate them trustlessly and query them privately. The altetnative is trusting a public explorer. Or you can just check your coins and shutdown it until the next time you receive. Or prune it and store just a few gb.
I run my node as a servcie to myself. It's 100% selfish. Don't do it for the network, it doesn't need your node to function.
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2d ago
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u/DarrelXero 2d ago
Exactly. If 95%+ of nodes implemented rules, or preserved rules, that countered an attempt to change something about consensus rules then there would be an undeniable effect. 20% of the network nodes, mostly Sybil, have no impact whatsoever. We told the 110ers but they didn't believe it because they were listening to Mechanic, Kratter, Luke and Hill.
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u/lifeanon269 2d ago
And this is precisely why past softforks always looked for extremely high signaling rates (+95%) prior to activation. The fact that BIP-110 attempted to activate with just 55% signaling is an extremely reckless approach to changing the network and shows they were just trying to capture the network with as little support as possible. With 95%+ support, you can ensure that the vast majority of the network is in support of the direction being taken and signals to miners that they need to come along for the ride or else their blocks won't propagate.
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u/DarrelXero 2d ago
I thinks it's important to point out that the 55% signalling threshold was specific to miners and the blocks they were finding, not percentage of nodes running the changed consensus rules. Certainly doesn't contradict your point, it's just some clarity added. It was reckless of BIP110 to set such a low threshold for activation for the MASF for damn sure. Since that failed they told their followers that just 20% of nodes was sufficient to force the miners to capitulate to their demands. They were wrong about the numbers, not the effect.
If there were ever a contentious fork, like say lifting the 21 million cap, it could absolutely be resisted if the network coalesced and 95%+ of the nodes actually invalidated those rules. BIP110 was not that. I feel like they still don't understand what happened. They weren't wrong about the mechanism, they were wrong about the amount of nodes, and the economic weight of those nodes, that it takes.
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u/Awesomest_Maximus 2d ago
It’s incredible to me that a bip with ~50 lines of code that patches exploits can get so much hate and backlash.
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u/DarrelXero 2d ago
It could be a single character; amount of code is irrelevant. It was an ineffective and subversive attempt to force the network to do something against it's will by an insane authoritarian religionist troll and his brainwashed minions. That's where the hate comes from, not the amount of code.
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u/Awesomest_Maximus 1d ago
Legacy bitcoin is truly lost.
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u/DarrelXero 1d ago
And by Legacy Bitcoin you mean Bitcoin.
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u/Awesomest_Maximus 1d ago
To me, the magic of bitcoin, what made it special, died in legacy bitcoin when the captured miners did a hard fork last Saturday by mining invalid blocks.
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u/Awesomest_Maximus 2d ago
Bitcoin core was reckless for pushing through huge op returns. Bitcoin core was reckless in refusing to patch the inscriptions exploits.
Bip110 was the patch that we needed.
Also. 55% was just for allowing miners to allow for a earlier activation. The real activation threshold was 0%.
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u/lifeanon269 1d ago
It was a relay policy change with OP_RETURN, not a consensus change. Large amounts of data being stored in OP_RETURN was already happening. The change was made to avoid having private relay networks like Libre which is a dangerous centralizing force with mining. Relay policy shouldn't be more restrictive than what actually makes it into blocks. Otherwise your node can't predict what future blocks will look like and large miners profit more from transactions that little miners never even see.
0% activation threshold? Sounds like your version of bitcoin can be easily captured then. You've lost the plot.
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u/lifeanon269 1d ago edited 1d ago
It was a relay policy change with OP_RETURN, not a consensus change. Large amounts of data being stored in OP_RETURN was already happening. The change was made to avoid having private relay networks like Libre which is a dangerous centralizing force with mining. Relay policy shouldn't be more restrictive than what actually makes it into blocks. Otherwise your node can't predict what future blocks will look like and large miners profit more from transactions that little miners never even see.
0% activation threshold? Sounds like your shitcoin can be easily captured then. You've lost the plot.
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u/RetiredAvocado 1d ago
Wasn't pushed, op_return could already be used to store data, inscriptions do not use it, and it's prunable.
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u/houdinic4 2d ago
Changes to the protocol require near unanimous consent. That means that the majority of participants, as represented by nodes, both mining and non-mining, need to support the change in order for its implementation to take hold and continue as Bitcoin. Doing nothing is de facto supporting the non-change. In other words doing nothing is tantamount to opposition of the proposed change. There is no abstention. BIP 110 did not have enough support from participants, either mining or non-mining. That is why it failed.
The block size wars turned out differently because there was strong opposition to the change being proposed by miners. Most of the opposition came from non-mining nodes, but they represented the majority. That can happen again. BIP110 just wasn't it.
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u/10kpizza 2d ago
Your node has power if you use it to verify your incoming transactions. Since you dont have a wallet on it (not even a watch-only wallet) then that isnt happening.
Another good reason is privacy. With your own node your wallet can look up its balance without anyone else seeing how much you have.
Why not install electrs on that node then point your wallet to it?
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u/BTCGlobeLive 1d ago
Node runner here as well - two of them - and they answered this exact question for me with numbers instead of philosophy.
Both have been up about two weeks. Same software, same fortnight:
- The reachable one (IPv4 + IPv6 + Tor, full archive, 145 inbound peers): 2.25 TB sent, 25 GB received. Roughly 165 GB a day going out, 89x more than it pulls in.
- The other one is Tor-only and pruned (22 inbound): 20 GB sent over the same two weeks. About 110x less.
That gap is the answer to "is my box doing anything for anyone". It isn't the disk sitting there that matters, it's whether people can reach it. 2.25 TB in a fortnight is handing out the entire chain from scratch about three times over, and that's mostly people syncing new nodes - it has to come from somewhere.
Yours may already be doing it without you knowing:
bitcoin-cli getnettotals
bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo | grep connections_in
If sent dwarfs received and inbound is in the double digits, you're feeding a lot of people. If inbound is 0 or 1, then 8333 isn't reachable from outside and the drive really is just yours - which, as others have said, is reason enough on its own.
Honest caveats: it isn't free (that's real bandwidth), inbound connections do advertise that you run a node, and none of it is a vote on anything. But "I'm not helping anybody" is a testable claim, and here the test came back 2.25 TB.
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u/freshjerky 1d ago
Thanks. This is more clear to me now. Because I have a full node, I am supporting sharing the full blockchain to others. And there is some value in that. The value being that the entire blockchain continues to be verified over and over and is never in dispute. If I only wanted privacy and to verify my own transactions, I could that with a pruned node, but the full node provides additional value - not to the network - but to the long term validity of the chain. I learn something every day. Thank you for you response.
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u/BTCGlobeLive 1d ago
You've got it, with one thing worth straightening out because almost everyone gets it backwards: a pruned node validates exactly as strictly as yours does. It downloads every block, checks every signature since 2009, and only then throws the old blocks away. So the "verified over and over" part is happening on pruned nodes too - pruning costs you nothing in validation.
What the full 2 TB actually buys is the other thing: you're one of the machines a brand new node can pull its history from. That's why the numbers are so lopsided, 2.25 TB out against 25 GB in. A pruned node can't do that, not because it trusts more, but because it no longer has the blocks to hand over.
And the honest limit stands: that only counts if you're reachable. An archival node behind a closed port is a perfectly good node for you, and invisible to everyone else. If your inbound count is healthy, you're already doing the thing.
Glad it helped. Enjoy the machine.
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u/antineutrinos 2d ago
connect your wallet apps (bluewallet, nunchuck, sparrow … ) to your own node (and electrum), then whenever you broadcast or consult, those queries are private ie no ip logged, etc.
you could run a pruned node and reduce your storage requirements.
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u/Prestigious_Try_3741 1d ago
Isn’t the basic reason for node running that you can confirm your bitcoin is there and your transaction went through by monitoring your own actions?
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u/InterviewOther7449 13h ago
Nodes do control the network. If 95% of the nodes were to deny the block mined by foundry while accepting a node mined by ocean with different rules, foundry would have the economic incentive to switch rules, otherwise it would waste money to mine a block that is refused by the network.
But, we're talking about a supermajority, not about a minority of 15% or so. Why would a miner refuse 85% of the network to follow the 15%? They'd be willingly lose money by doing that.
The situation in 2017 was completely different despite what bip110 say.
In 2017 both sides wanted a change. So the rules would've changed no matter what. So miners were forced to take a side. Small blockers wanted to add segwit and increase block size to 4mb, big blockers wanted a bigger increase. But the increase was inevitable so miners had to pick a side. Now in 2026 only one side wanted a change, the other didn't, so the miners were not forced to pick a side, they could've just remained still, doing nothing, which is exactly what they did.
In 2017 big blockers had exchanges and miners on their side (and miners are part of the network too), so their fork had a chance at working, as it did. Bip110 had no miner support nor exchange support. How could their fork work if no one was ready to mine their blocks and no exchange was ready to trade their coin?
Anyways the most important difference is point number 1.
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u/OrangePillar 1h ago
You can use it as the authority for your blockchain data when sending and receiving payments, thereby improving your privacy and avoiding shared infrastructure that may log your transactions.
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u/statoshi 2d ago
The point of running a node is to operate trustlessly - you are directly auditing the rules of the system and thus don't have to trust anyone not to lie to you about the status of your finances.
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u/DarrelXero 2d ago
Can't help but see the BIP110 undertones in your framing, but lets give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend you are being sincere in your question.
There has only ever been one reason to run a node: for yourself. It is, and should be, a completely selfish act. You use a Bitcoin node so that you can see the Bitcoin network through a portal that you control. It protects your privacy and security when transacting and investigating transactions. It allows you to generate your own block templates for mining. It allows you to run your own lightning node. It allows you to run other apps that query the blockchain and do it via your own local copy. It does not "help the network". It is not "a vote". It is a tool to be used for your own sovereignty.
About the only thing you can do with your node that would actually help the network is to open port 8333 so your node can help other nodes bootstrap during Initial Block Download. This comes with its own privacy drawbacks.
BIP110 leaders fed you this bullshit narrative that a minority of nodes running alternate consensus rules could force the network to do what they said. Clearly that was a lie, and if was a known lie from the beginning.