Crypto Nodes

Intro (what for)

I originally set up clickforafrica.org (where users will be able to support charitable projects directly without a middleman to spoil things) using coinpayments.net as the payment processor. It worked fine during testing:

  • Each user has a wallet and can generate their own addresses to send their currency to. This can be from any faucet, game or offers site. Or they could just deposit coins if they want to.
  • Users can send their funds to their chosen recipient with no fees directly within the site.
  • Recipients can withdraw to any BTC address
  • We sent about 700 USD of BTC to Evans during testing, which paid for a much better internet connection among other things. This is what I and one other person had got from the free sites.

So we were just ready to start phase 2, actual public beta test, and coinpayments demanded KYC crap (not their fault, it was government). I could see that going along with that would only be the start of a slippery slope, no point in giving any quarter to tyrants, there is only one ending to that path. The only alternative is to set up our own node.

The nodes are what keeps the network behaving itself well. The miners just mine, the nodes are the ones that check everything and verify it. This also will enable us to plug it in to our site (now using clickforcharity.net) and have everything work as before, but under our control, not the bankers.

We can use BTCPay server for our payments system.

Old stuff below, kept for reference.

  • Mint fresh install done
  • bitcoin node installed
  • teamviewer installed
  • ssh-server installed
  • ssh andy@tc1.local works
  • andy@tc1.62.77.173.85 doesn’t but I didn’t really think it would…

TO DO

  • figure how to make ssh launch on boot.
  • create new admin user
  • figure how to ssh from outside. (router has ssh port open)
  • tell bitcoin to store the blockchain on the second drive (1TB)
  • Install bitcoin (the gui version is the same as bitcoind but with a gui) this guide looks recent and good. (done and worked on Raspberry Pi but not secure enough (me, not the machine!) wait for someone who knows what they’re doing.