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Serving Bitcoin – refurbished bitcoin nodesservingbitcoin.com/
1183 sats \ 11 comments \ @Scoresby 29 Aug bitcoin
I'm a fan of running a node on old computers, and I came across this site that will sell you one with everything ready to go.
It seems like they load StartOS onto it and make sure everything is working.
Here's a list of steps they go through in prepping a machine
I noticed that they don't ship it with a copy of the blockchain. If you trust them to install the OS and all that, what do you gain by doing IBD yourself?
Put differently, would you be interested in a device that came with the first 900,000 blocks already downloaded and verified?
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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @servingbitcoin_com 14h
Thank you for the shout out.
Yes. We create StartOS DIY x86 nodes from refurbished PCs. We do so by testing the existing hardware, optionally installing new hardware like 2TB or 4TB NVMe drives or RAM, perform firmware updates, and preinstall StartOS DIY.
We sell both Full (2TB or 4TB) and Pruned (256GB) nodes. At this time, StartOS is only preinstalled. Users must chose which version of bitcoin to install (Core or Knots) and perform the initial blockchain download.
It is possible for us to preinstall either Core or Knots and have most of the blockchain already synced. But this bears more risk.
  • We will have to set the StartOS password and hope the customer changes is
  • The node's LAN address will no longer be http://start.local/, but will be a random http://noun-verb.local/ (making it more difficult for us to provide access instructions, and more support tickets)
  • The TOR address will also be generated; adding customer risk that we might remotely connect and login
With good communication, perhaps these risks could be mitigated.
Regarding trusting us with StartOS, we prefer customers don't. The BIOS is unlocked and savvy users may reinstall whatever they want (StartOS, Umbrel, NodeOS, or even non-Bitcoin solutions like Linux or Proxmox).
There are, however, users who want things done for them. We feel a factory-fresh image of StartOS DIY with all default settings is the best balance for risk and convenience.
We're young and small. Ping us on Nostr (npub16jwvpxxpg5zkfcemmyx9ryreje5suh5hluxa4e4uhpmve3cudrrsk8cjwp) if you have any further suggestions or ideas. Thank you for serving bitcoin in any way you see fit.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 14h
Cool! Thanks for the info! I hadn't heard about your project before, but it sounds like a great deal.
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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @Akg10s3 29 Aug
If I'm interested..
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Aug
Dunno, just curious how people are thinking about trade-offs here.
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102 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibertasBR 30 Aug
The idea is good, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I personally wouldn't trust a machine with everything pre-installed like that. If it came completely empty, I'd trust it more, and it still takes away all the fun of searching for the machine, formatting, downloading, installing, and configuring everything.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @LOR3LORD 29 Aug
commenting to come back to this so i can research it more when i have time. im new and want to know the purpose of purchasing a device that has the first 900k blocks already downloaded and verified. what is the benefit?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Aug
it seems to me that the question is similar to what is the purpose of purchasing a device with the software preloaded onto it -- in both cases, it's handy to have someone else do something fiddly. Installing your own operating system is only a little more technically involved than installing bitcoin core and downloading and verifying the whole chain. And waiting for the initial block download to complete is kinda a pain in the ass. The only reason people do it is so they don't have to trust someone else -- but if you've already trusted them to install the OS on your computer, why wouldn't you also trust them to give you a copy of the chain?
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @_stacktoshi 29 Aug
I think for the same reason you can't just bittorrent the blockchain, even if you somehow trusted the source. You basically need to replay all transactions in order to rebuild the spendable state, so that you can verify future transactions. By randomly getting the blocks from different network peers, you're corroborating the integrity of what's being transferred. But there are proposed optimizations: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/assumeutxo/
Seems like you could just spot check your chain and UTXO set though.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Aug
I agree, except that I don't understand the difference between trusting someone else to install your OS and trusting someone else to give you an up-to-date copy of the chain. I'm sure there's some version of malware that could be put on a machine that man in the middles you when you try to sign a transaction over a certain threshold. Or it does this when you generate an address to receive.
My point is that in the case where you trust someone else to install software on a device both of you know will be used for bitcoin activities, why not trust them to give you a copy of the chain as well?
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102 sats \ 1 reply \ @_stacktoshi 30 Aug
Code is shipped with any device that contains processing units, so unless you can verify that the code only does what it's supposed to do, there's a basic level of trust that you have to accept. So then the question goes past just startOS. If they didn't have an OS and gave you a usb drive with all the linux packages that you could independently checksum, you'd still need to trust all the authors of the code that's gonna run on that machine, including firmware. So, you're right, they might as well include a copy of the blockchain, as long as you could reliably verify it. And people generally aren't going to be putting their life savings on these devices since they're hot wallets. An attacker isn't going to strike it rich before word gets out about the supply-chain attack.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 30 Aug
You are getting at exactly what I was thinking.
Two points though:
  1. while most people hopefully are using something else as their cold storage, they might frequently use such devices as watch-only wallets, and as such they might be using them to generate receive addresses for their cold storage.
  2. my second point is that bitcoin-specific machinery may be more likely to get attacked. Or at least it is more likely to be a target.
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