Crypto Nodes

Intro (what for)

I originally set up clickforafrica.org (for users to 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 had a wallet and could generate their own addresses to send their currency to. This could be from any faucet, game, or offers site. Or they could just deposit coins if they wanted to.
  • Users could send their funds to their chosen recipient with no fees directly within the site.
  • Recipients could 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 gotten from the free sites.

So we were just ready to start phase 2, the actual public beta test, and CoinPayments demanded KYC crap. I could see that going along with that would only be the start of a slippery slope; there is no point in giving any quarter to tyrants; that path always leads to the same bad place. The only alternative was to set up our own node.

The nodes are what keep the network behaving well. The miners just mine; the nodes are the ones that check everything and verify it. This also would 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.

BUT running a node for myself was one thing; running a node that was responsible for other people’s money is another. So, long story short, at least for now we can use coinos.io because that has all we need to achieve our goal of direct peer-to-peer transfers that can still be verified by us instantly and entered into the accounts. So, below is redundant; I’m just leaving it there for reference.

Below Is Redundant

  • Pi set up and running,
  • installed bitcoin core using this page for instructions.
  • Networking set up using this page.

We can use BTCPay server for our payment 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 out how to make SSH launch on boot.
  • Create new admin user
  • Figure out how to SSH from outside. (router has an 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 (link gone) 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.