Thanks for the replies. I want to keep the project fairly simple, so I don't want to get involved with running scripts, or anything other than using the basic core software. The idea of changing ports is good, but the probability is that the WiFi provider will have blocked all but basic Internet ports and functions. The simplest solution is just to use a different restaurant.

I'm a great believer in project based learning, so the suggeasted variants are good to help me to improve my knowledge, but there is so much going on in the world at the moment, that I want to keave this as a fairly minor and simple project. I took the decision to change my lifestyle a couple of years ago, and I'm only just starting to create the environment that I want. I have too much dross from the past that I need to clear. Now is a period of dramatic change in the UK. It looks as if we may get the Brexit we voted for ( no deal with the EU), and this will give us massive chances for growth in the future, however we are still controlled by the Eton/Oxford elite, and they are obviously trying to suppress this. The vaccination, face masks and lockdown stupidity illustrates this, and most people ignore the evidence of their eyes and social connections, and just accept the globalist narratives. I don't want to give away control of my health, wealth, food and freedom, and that is why I explore projects like this.

The netbook is a cheap HP Celeron machine that was built in January of 2017. It was bought with Windows 10 installed, and my first task was to scrap that, and I installed Ubuntu. This worked well until the update that disabled the keyboard, and this led me to doubt the long term support for the distro. I tried several other, and the one that works well at the moment is openSUSE. It is not a lightweight distro, and I am sure there are others that would be more suitable for this project. I don't want to research them, but maybe another member could offer some suggestions for low cost or free portable computers. The Hitachi drive is an opportunistic acquisition, and it came from a PS3 game console. I'll post the info about checking it and reformatting a bit later.

I'll install a 2Tb SSD in my Notebook, and replace the Windows with openSUSE, and I'll post about that to help anyone who wants tio switch to Linux and intall the Bitcoin Core. I waiting for the Asda cafe to open so that I can get a coffee and a bacon bun. 3 nice pieces of back bacon in a bap with a black coffe, and all for £2,50. I could make it in the van, but I'm a social animal, and it is more fun sitting at a comfortable table using their WiFi. It's a bit slow, but it will do to get started.

You can't download the whole blockchain and retain it if you don't have the storage capacity.

I appreciate that there are some limitations with a pruned node, but for a person who is new to Bitcoin, and has limited resources, then I believe it can be a good introduction.It also helps the Bitcoin community.

I don't think there is much risk for a prudent user of Linux if he uses public WiFi. The greatest problem will be the slow speed. There is also the possibility that the WiFi provided will not allow the ports used by core to be opened. The benefit is that it may allow a user with a limited budget to operate a fully functional node. It can also help people who are travelling, and even moving between countries.

Wrong - vaccines are not cures. In fact vaccinating an infected person is the worst thing you can do. All it does is to increase the viral load, and make it harder to recover. It is about as much use as the old concept of bleeding. It increases the damage and the work the body has to do whilst it is attempting to repair the damage. An antibody injection may be useful if a person has a viral overload, or has an immune system that has been damaged by previous vaccinations. It is complete madness to inject the 'flu virus into a person recovering from Covid, all it does is to increase the work of the immune system, and delay recovery - and that is the best situation. It could cause an overload and force the person into ICU.

You have to differentiate between vaccination and antibody injection. Take the case of snake bite for example. The human body can neutralise the venom that has been injected directly into the body, but a large quantity of fast acting venom may overload the immune reaction, and this can cause the immune system to start to shut down. Death or paralysis is the result. It is dependent on body mass, and this is why venom is injected into donkeys, and the antibodies are harvested. These can be injected into humans,and this counters the venom, and gives the human body a chance to recover. Vaccinations are a totally different proposition, They are injected into healthy people,and even people who have developed natural immunity. They are unnatural and cause many problems, both short and long term.

I don't think it will help you if you are trying to conceal your actions from the authorities. I will be running core from the main hard drive, and just using the disk to store wallet and blockchain info. I suppose you could have two disks with different wallet addresses, and keep the balance in one fairly low. You would have to keep both of them in sync though. Either way, it will be apparent that you have been using Bitcoin to anyone looking at the file structure in your computer. Also, you should be aware that the internet port used by Bitcoin for synchronisation is not a standard one used for browsing. Your ISP or service provider will be aware of your usage if it is illegal in your country.

If you assign the drive when you first run core, then you don't need much tech knowledge, but you will have to know the physical address of the drive. Partitioning and formatting will depend on the operating system you will be using. I'm going to be using a Linux variant, and the commands are pretty simple, even though you will need to run them using terminal. I suspect the greatest problem will be the time required for the initial synchronisation, especially as I am intending to run the project at the lowest cost possible.

The elite dynasties invest in creating corrupt politicians. This allows them to control countries, and steal their assets. They recruit young prospects through scholarships like the Rhodes scholarships, and The Schwarzman scholars.

Maybe we could have a box in the member's profile that shows he is prepared to offer escrow services.
I don't offer such services, and it would be useful to indicate this without tying up some other reference in my profile.

I thought it was time for asnother project that might help members who are new(ish) to Bitcoin. One of the best ways to learn about Bitcoin, and its associated blockchain is to run a node. However, the blockchain is getting pretty large now, and many members may not want to dedicate a large chunk of their hard drive to storing a ccomplete chain. A pruned node allows you to maintain a fully functional node, but it only requires a fraction of the storage space. Of course you can use part of your system memory for the storage, but there are a few reasons for using an external drive.  One is security,  you can keep the drive  away from your main computer, and if it is stiolen or compromised, then you may not lose your wallet. Another advantage is the ability to move your wallet between computers - maybe you use one machine at work, and another at home. Yet another consideration is the amount of spare space on your computer, and you may want to keep this free for daily tasks.

If there is sufficient interst, I will use a salvaged 320Gb Hitachi drive, which was taken from a scrap PS3 gaming machine. I have purchased a Sabient USB hard drive enclosure for £8, and this is the only additional expenditure for this project. I will use a low spec Celeron Netbook to run the system, and the drive will be connected through a USB3 port. I will start the blockchain from scratch using public WiFi for the synchronisation, so it will probably take a few weeks to get up to speed. I have installed openSUSE Linux on the Netbook, and it recognises the drive, and reports the correct capacity. However it describes it as having an unknown file system, so I will repartition it, and format and test it before I start the core software. I plan to use EXT4 for the file system, and just hasve a single partition. Please comment if you don't believe this is the best option.

Please let me know if you think this is a project worth reporting, and if the associated discussion will be of interest to members of this board

Yes, I am a merit source, and I was only discussing smerit refreshment for sources. Regular smerits have different rules, and fewer restricyions on their awarding.

My understanding is that your bucket doesn't have a time frame for refilling, but each replacement smerit has its own shelf life of 30 days. If is not spent during that period, then it decays, and cannot be spent or replaced. This means that less active merit sources may have a decreasing  pool of source smerits to spend. If that pool drops to zero, then the person is removed as a merit source. Periodically source smerits are reviewed according to a published formula. In this calculation source smerits and earned smerits that have been spent are aggregated, and a new limit is allocated. It is slightly higher than the rate of merit awarding for the relevant period. This means that the supply of smerits available for an active source will increase gradually. Thus a profligate spender supporting spammers will be able to provide more support. This will come from his increased allowance, and fromn any reciprocal "earned" smerits.

Covid is a bankers' scam. They should be ignoring it in the way that they ignore the 'flu ( which is far more serious).
Getting away from the EU is the top priority, and we have already got 50 trade deals with counties other than the EU. The EU has rhe economic problems, not the UK.

It's all a red herring really as the City of London controls the EU and the UK, but we have to play the games to avoid the public becoming aware of the real issues. Restoring the health of our fishing grounds is a top priority for the environment. They EU pillaged them, and destroyed much of the stock. The sooner the EU collapse, the better all of Europe will be.

Shipping fees are a bit high on that, and you may have to pay an import duty. Sandisk is a good reliable make, and the 512Gb card dropped in price when they brought out the 1Tb

Lets make it quite clear. Merits are not there to help members to rank up. They were created as a barrier to stop spammers and low quality posters being rewarded for polluting the forum. If good quality posters are leaving the forum, then tyhe solution is not to promote the spammers, but to improve the quality of the threads. There are several ways to do this.

- reduce the size of quotes to improve legibility.
- stop obsessing over statistics, and spend the time discussing the crypto economies.
- don't feed the trolls, and those who feel they have to attack other members with flame wars.
- encourage the knowledgeable and insightful to post more
- give us a few new boards to discuss serious topics - hardware, domains, and defi are obvious choices.
-

They have ripped us off by taking our fish, and selling them back to us, as they have stripped our fishing grounds. This resulted in the loss of a lot of jobs for our fishermen. It's time to rebuild the fish stocks for the benefit of the eco system as well as the UK. I think all foreign fishing vessels should be banned for at least 5 years, as they don't respect the sustainability of the marine life.

We voted for a clean break from the EU. Now after 5 years, it time that we got it.

There seems to be a focus on quantity and volume, and not on quality. This seems to be true of many things at the moment. It is quite hard to find food thart is of the same quality as a few years ago. In part this is due to the lower food standards of the EU being forced onto the UK, but maybe the shift to online purchases is the major reason. As membership of this forum increases, and the more intersting and insightful topics are drowned by the newer members social posting, some members are resorting to making large statistical posts, and these seem to be gaining in popularity and reward, but contribute n, and not used to bloat discussions. I dkip over the posts if I am on the computer, but if I am on mobile, I have to avoid opening a thread that may contain such posts, especially if they are quoted.

In the end, the remedy is in our hands. We can increase the number of quality posts that we make, and this could be more beneficial than spending time on merit showers.

That is not completely true. It may be better to allow merits to expire rather than award them for posts that you feel are undeserving. Showering merits just because buckets are full is the equivalent of creating storms because clouds are full of water. Then end result is the drowning of the land.

I'm really grateful to you for suggesting this, and I have been reading this article.
https://opensource.com/business/16/9/linux-users-guide-lvm

I'm not sure that it is suitable for my node, but I think it will be a great help with my domains, web sites and images. I've got maybe a dozen or so external drives that I have salvaged, and the latest of these is this Hitachi one -
https://www.expertreviews.co.uk/storage/internal-hard-drives/50686/hitachi-z7k320-review
It came out of a scrap Xbox, and I'm waiting for the delivery of a USB case so that I can test it.

It really is time I got some order into my site structures, and maybe this will give me a chance to do this.

Bill Gates learnt his trade with viruses on Windows.

God gave us sunshine, Bitcoin and Linux. Stay with the natural choices that benefit the people.

I sometimes get offers to enhance my wedding tackle, and I admit that sometimes I am naked in front of the computer ( but not in McDonalds). I'm not sure if they are watching me on the camera, but I stuck a loyalty coffee bean over the lens just in case. It's a good job that I don't feel that I am disadvantaged physically.

Coin Telegraph reports that the hackers who stole 120,000 BTC back in 2016 have just moved another $30million of Bitcoin into unknown wallets. This follows a number of other transactions executed earlier this year. Read the full report here -
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitfinex-hackers-move-another-30m-in-stolen-bitcoin-from-2016

It would apper that they are managing to realise some of the profits from this hack. This is despite the public records of all Bitcoin transactions. Do you think that they will eventually be able to realise all of the stolen gains? There is a substantial reward for anyone who aids in the recovery of these funds, but nobody seems to be able to trace the perpetrators.

I'm planning to run a Bitcoin node on something like a Raspberry Pi, so I started to look for high capacity SD cards, and I found this one on Amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gentai-Designed-Android-Smartphones-Tablets/dp/B08FDLXL46/ref=sr_1_13?dchild=1&keywords=1tb+sd+card&qid=1602316988&sr=8-13
The price has come down from £30 I understand, and before you rush off to buy one. Have a look at this video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idh4-DzeFDw

It seems these cards are old, low capacity ones, that have been modified to appear to have !Tb of memory, but probably only have 1Gb or so. They have been on Amazon for some time, and I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't do something to block such sales. Some of them even have 5 star ratings that are obviously fake. A 1Tb Sandisk Extreme card is about £300, so a card for £10 is obviously a scam.

Remember - If it looks too good to be true, then it probably isn't.

I understood that the replenishment date was based on the awarding of the merit, and not on the bucket creation. Also, I believe that the merit in the bucket has an award by date, and it is discarded if it is not used before that date. My merit refreshment flows in, it doesn't arrive in one monthly bang.