Bitcoin Knots Synchronisation Lost \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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420 sats \ 12 comments \ @spiderman 9h bitcoin_beginners

Started running Bitcoin Knots version v29.1.knots20250903 on my Ubuntu 24.04 box.

Weighted for a few days to synchronise with the Blockchain, then, close to 99% completion, all of a sudden the knots flashes a dialogue box saying

Witness data for blocks after height 481824 requires validation, please restart with re-index

and gave me two options Abort or Ok.

If I click Abort, the knots process kills itself. So I clicked Ok, the the synchronisation started again from 4th January 2009.

And the whole thing happened twice. So a bit frustrated. What's the deal here? If I already have the blocks validated in my hard drive, can I use them without having to resynch from the beginning?

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226 sats \ 9 replies \ @optimism 9h

This means that the chainstate could not be fully verified and is not specific to Knots. I've had this happen with Core on machines with:

Bad RAM
Bad disk

and it's really hard to reproduce for others. See also #1060416

If it happens again:

Run memtest
Inspect SMART reports for your disk

Let us know what it says if it comes this far - may make sense to do this regardless of whether the issue persists.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 4h

Speaking of #1060416, is there a hardware guide for running an efficient bitcoin node anywhere?

I built my node during the old days when a raspberry pi and a 1 TB external SSD was enough. But it seems like the resource pressure is higher now, but I don't understand much about hard drive specs like DRAM cache, or other specs that might help make running a node smoother.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 1h

What do you use it for?

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 1h

Right now, nothing. It's supposed to be my main lightning node. I used to use it for a bit of routing (never profitable), and for broadcasting my own transactions from command line (a good educational experience). But ever since I wiped it and rebuilt it and it took a month to IBD, I lost interest a bit. Primarily just using Alby Desktop for now. Overall though, my goal of having this node would be to validate blocks myself, broadcast my own transactions, help the network, and run a more stable lightning node than my current Alby Desktop (which isn't always on.)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 47m

I'll write something up when I'm done testing and tuning (still haven't started, sorry) for self-validation/broadcast. Re: LN node. I've never approached it like that, running everything on one Pi, but can have a look once I'm done w/ the bitcoind.

21 sats \ 4 replies \ @spiderman OP 8h

What a pity! It is a few month old machine with well above average hardware specs, and I am regularly running some heavy machine learning workload (training and inference with GPU) without any issue. So it's a surprise to know that Knots surfaces some deep hardware bug that nothing else I run has an issue with.

I am a fairly technical software guy, but debugging at hardware level (may be I can pull it off by some google searches and research) is not my cup of tea, mainly because of time than anything else. But I will try.

It may discourage many among us from running a node at all.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 8h

It may discourage many among us from running a node at all.

What are you using your node for?

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @spiderman OP 8h

What are you using your node for?

I read that it in itself is a small contribution to the network, and also, when it synchronises, I plan to use it to broadcast my sparrow wallet transactions.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 8h

Okay. The "contribution" thing really depends on how well your node runs, how good your uplink is, how much people sync off you, and so on. In general, small, slow nodes are a burden to the network, so make sure to keep learning how to help the network best.

For actually verifying your own blocks and posting your own transactions, it's of course a great use-case.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 6h

with well above average hardware specs

posts specs pls

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @035736735e 7h

Unfortunately, there’s no quick “just trust the blocks you already have” button. Bitcoin Knots (and Core) have strict cryptographic validation rules, and any mismatch between what’s expected in the database versus what’s actually there means it will start from Genesis to rebuild the chainstate from scratch. That’s just the reality of running fully validating nodes replay is the only way to be certain the UTXO set and witness commitments match consensus.

If you really want to avoid another multi-day resync, the only feasible approach is to grab a fully validated blockchain from a machine you trust that’s running the same software version, same consensus rules, and was started with witness data enabled. Even then, it has to live on the same architecture and OS environment to avoid compatibility headaches. For most people, letting Knots do the clean reindex is the safer bet, even if it’s annoying.

What you’re seeing is actually one of the design strengths of Bitcoin: no shortcuts when it comes to consensus. It’s frustrating in the short term, but in the long term it’s the reason you can be confident your node is seeing the same reality as every other honest node out there.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 6h

What's your bitcoin.conf?

Anything in dmesg or mce

Might be hardware. Had this on a windows box a few times. Once due to bad SSD. Replaced. Then that crappy machine started overheating.

I've had no issues on several healthy Ubuntu mini-PCs and laptops.