Bitcoind (Full Node) Requirements

Some of those that showed up to last night’s Phoenix Bitcoin Meetup showed interest in running a full node / lightning node, possibly on a Raspberry Pi or Odroid single-board computer.

There were questions about system requirements. I believe a baseline requirement for a lightning node is running a full node, so I thought I’d give my observations running a full node at almost pure default settings (no custom .conf file) run with this command: bitcoind -conf=$(pwd)/bitcoin.conf -datadir=$(pwd) -txindex -logips -server -rpcpassword=$BTC_RPC_PASSWORD -rpcuser=$BTC_RPC_USER -daemon -disablewallet

• top
  • My bitcoind (server) process is taking up 1.4GB of memory as it runs.
  • It idles between 1-5% CPU (running an i7-4770 w/ 4 virtual cores).
• nethogs
  • The bandwidth idles (ie not aggressively syncing the entire chain from scratch) at a constant 10KB/s.
  • Keep in mind that means each week you’re using 60*60*24*7=604800 =~ 605MB, or about 2.5GB a month.
• du
  • The blocks directory containing the blockchain and its indices take up about 200GB.
  • The chainstate directory containing the utxo set is about 3GB.
  • The (optional) txindex takes up about 20GB.
  • That’s a total of about 220GB for the bitcoind directory.

There are several guides to run this on a Raspberry Pi or other singleboard computers in order to get the CPU / Mem / Bandwidth. Almost all recommend bootstrapping the node with a full-size computer first, then moving the files over to the single-board.

For anyone interested, I am willing to bring an external drive to a future meetup containing my bitcoind directory. This way, you can bootstrap your own node without having to download & seed the entire 200GB blockchain on your own. It took me over a week, so this should save you a lot of time. Just let me know.

I will probably also run a Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV node since they share the majority of their blocks with Bitcoin Core, so they are already bootstrapped well for me and I can deduplicate the files. I plan to finish writing a distributed blockchain explorer in the near future using IPFS, hopefully for all three coins.