Running A Node

Marcus had been in Bitcoin for four years. He’d read everything. He held through the 2022 crash. He’d moved his Bitcoin to a hardware wallet. He understood the theory of nodes — that running one meant verifying Bitcoin’s history yourself rather than trusting someone else’s version.

On a Saturday afternoon, with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive he’d ordered online, he set one up.

The process took a few hours. He installed the software, connected the drive, pointed it at the network. The initial block download started — his node beginning to download every Bitcoin transaction ever made, from January 2009 to the present, verifying each one independently.

It took about three days. His node sat in the corner of his home office, quietly downloading and verifying. He checked it occasionally. The block count crept upward.

When it reached block 1 — the block right after the genesis block — he noticed the timestamp. January 9, 2009. He thought about Satoshi, sitting somewhere, launching this thing into the world with no idea whether anyone would care.

When his node finished and reached the current block height, Marcus sat with it for a moment. His computer had now independently verified every Bitcoin transaction ever made. Not trusted someone else’s copy. Verified it himself.

He couldn’t quite explain why it felt significant. He already knew Bitcoin’s history. He’d read about the genesis block, the pizza transaction, Mt. Gox. But seeing his node confirm all of it — block by block, independently — felt different from reading about it.

Some things in Bitcoin you understand intellectually long before you feel them.

Tomorrow: bridge to Part 8 — Lightning and daily use.

— The Daily Bit