My goal is to write a small POC app for aggregating metrics like:
- count of new wallets created within a particular time range
- count of wallets within a particular time range with balances > X
and many more metrics like this for the purpose of gauging global interest/activity in Bitcoin at any given time.

The reason I didn't wan't to run a full node on my local machine is because it doesn't stay up and I wanted a node w/reliable uptime so I could get more up-to-date chain data.

I realize I can just rent a compute instance from a cloud provider and run a full node on that but then I would have to spend money.

It looks like that's going to be the best solution for me and I should just stop being so cheap.

Alternatively, do guys know of any online services that already provide this information? What do you guys use?

Just registered here and new to the eco-system.

Apologies in advance for stupid questions.

I want to programmatically establish a connection to a node using a Go RPC client as outlined here:
https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/blob/master/docs/json_rpc_api.md#9-example-code

However, I do not wan't to run my own node.

I wan't to connect to someones' already running node.

I found some nodes I may wan't to connect to here:
https://bitnodes.io/nodes/?q=United%20States

So looks like I need a valid:
- rpc.cert
- rpcuser
- rpcpass

What is the standard procedure for obtaining these for a node that I am not running?

Is this even something I can do?

Thanks!