Bring up a full bitcoin validator node

[eloylp]

Lets finally start with this project ! 🥳

What are the expectations ❓

We are here to learn more about about Bitcoin. We also want to provide a containerised, fully automated way of bringing up a Bitcoin validator node. That could also help/motivate other community members to easily adopt and maintain a Bitcoin validator node, increasing adoption.

One of the fundamentals of this research is to be able to do some kind of on-chain analysis, once we have the Bitcoin validator node. We have some Ideas around trying out timescale. But this should be a second step not part of this issue.

We are going to use this issue as a communication hub/research log.

[eloylp]

First of all. What is a full bitcoin node ❓ From the bitcoin.org wiki:

A full node is a program that fully validates transactions and blocks. Almost all full nodes also help the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further full nodes.

Most full nodes also serve lightweight clients by allowing them to transmit their transactions to the network and by notifying them when a transaction affects their wallet. If not enough nodes perform this function, clients won’t be able to connect through the peer-to-peer network—they’ll have to use centralized services instead.

Its important to bear in mind that a validator node its not a miner. A miner creates blocks in the blockchain which the nodes keep. Basically, the miner adds transactions to a block, with the goal of creating a new block with a valid hash that will be accepted by the network. Miners spend about 10 minutes working on a problem, but nodes keep that result forever after in the database and verify it with others. Miners don't need to know about prior blocks (except for the prior one) with very few exceptions.

Once we have clarified that, its important to know that there also different kind of validator nodes, depending on the data they have, so the validation and storage capabilities:

• A full node is a participant on the network that has independently validated the complete copy of the blockchain, and thus has verified all transactions since the beginning. This requires about 350GB of drive space (currently). Fully validating nodes ("full nodes") are clients that have validated the whole blockchain self-sufficiently and enforce all of the rules of Bitcoin on any data they receive. Therefore, they cannot be cheated by means of invalid blocks or transactions. Running your own full node is the most secure, most private, and least trusting way to participate in the Bitcoin network. A full node is necessary to prevent invalid blocks when mining. Nodes that can serve the complete blockchain are also referred as Archival Nodes.

• A pruning node is one that has verified all prior transactions; however, it has deleted all blocks below a certain space requirement, but still has a copy of the UXTO (An UXTO refers to an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) that can be spent as an input in a new transaction.) set. Takes less resources on the computer (can be under 1GB of drive space). This is possible because blockchains, like hash functions, work with a merkle tree or hash tree under the hood, so technically its posible to resume validation at any point in the chain, by just knowing the last blocks hashes, as the entire blockchain was validated before, so the trust in the last block hashes.

As a full node is the only type of node that is capable of responding to getblocks and getheaders request. Which is what we are going to build on this project. The reason is that we want to do on-chain analysis in the future.

All sources

• https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#what-is-a-full-node
• https://developer.bitcoin.org/glossary.html
• https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/48436/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-term-full-node
• https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/59220/what-is-the-difference-between-a-miner-and-a-full-node
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree