The Cost of a Bitcoin Node - Eric Voskuil \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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The Cost of a Bitcoin Node - Eric Voskuil

https://xcancel.com/evoskuil/status/1964003672414728510

I don't know how accurate this chart is. Firstly the storage of the timechain will soon surpass 1TB. I have also found that due to the activity in the past few years that at least 8GB of RAM is required for IBD whereas 4GB used to be enough.

Seeing some of the comments he takes some shots at Core (That's Core, not Bitcoin). He also likes to tease that the cost of running a node will trend to zero over time.

I wouldn't be too confident either way. If we really get the world on a Bitcoin standard (as in settling onchain) or sh$tcoin traffic filling up blocks, storage costs could increase.

What do you think?

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367 sats \ 6 replies \ @nullcount 19h

Now show the price of storage in BTC terms! Running a node gets exponentially cheaper if you invested your BTC into your node instead of saving in fiat for node upgrades.

Lightning nodes, especially, can benefit from more expensive hardware like ECC RAM, RAID volumes, UPS, dual uplinks, etc.

The marginal new node is a net burden to the network. Unless it is actively listening for inbound connections and "seeding" blocks to peers, most nodes are just "leeching". To seed blocks, you need public IP and lots of bandwidth. Arguably, bandwidth is the "scarce commodity" which sets the floor price for a node. Many ISPs will throttle you after 1TB of usage in a single billing period.

151 sats \ 4 replies \ @siggy47 19h

The marginal new node is a net burden to the network. Unless it is actively listening for inbound connections and "seeding" blocks to peers, most nodes are just "leeching". To seed blocks, you need public IP and lots of bandwidth.

Can you expand on this further? Would this mean that the typical pleb, running an Umbrel or Start9, is probably doing more harm than good running a node?

150 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullcount 18h

Its okay to be a "burden" that's what the infrastructure is for. A new node doing Initial Block Download (IBD) is definitely occupying network's resources.

The marginal user isn't "helping" the network very much because they're not able/willing to upload terrabytes of block data to other new peers doing IBD. It takes additional configuration to share blocks using bitcoin core.

Running node is a mostly selfish act -- it request blocks from peers so you can verify them for yourself, it hoards and indexes the blocks so you can do transaction lookups without relying on a third party.

Running a node with listen=1 and a piblic IP bind address, uploading many TBs of blocks per month is a mostly altruistic act -- The most trusted altruistic nodes are listed in the seed_lists which bitcoin core nodes use to find their first peers on initial startup

28 sats \ 0 replies \ @trieska 15h

there is also listenonion=1 which I am using and when I check upload and download then I see more less same amount data

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 18h

Great information. Thanks. I can't help noticing that there aren't many altruistic nodes on the list.

There are countless articles and videos directed towards the tech unsophisticated bitcoiner listing "help to secure the network" as a benefit to running your own node. I guess that's inaccurate?

15 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 14h

The Bitcoin protocol, like democracy, is inherently reliant upon enough altruistic participants to remain viable.

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 19h

I definitely think we need to be looking at costs other than storage. Bandwidth, processing, and RAM all seem to matter, especially with the larger UTXO set.

217 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 19h

Storage has a maximum growth as long as nothing changes in the block size limitations or average block timing, so you can pretty much plan ahead at 5GB/wk worst case, which is allowing for constant 25% higher block rate (extreme hashrate growth and luck) and spam/consolidation txs filling up the witness space fully.

This means 1TB every 4 years.

So right now you'd plan capacity for your node at 2TB. Realized rate is however closer to 3GB per week, so if you plan for the worst, you'll have a lot of slack.

Memory is only an issue if you aim to make block templates or for a watchtower. For a simple home node used for your L1 coin, you can tune it to use less memory. There's a guide for Bitcoin Core here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 4h

The blockchain has been recently growing at about 80 GiB per year, or 1.6 MiB per block.