Here are the steps to set it up:
(1)Download
Bitcoin Core and install it. If you want to compile from source rather than running a precompiled binary:
* Linux build notes are
here* OSX build notes are
here* Windows build notes are
here(2)Run Bitcoin Core (either the graphical bitcoin-qt or the bitcoind daemon) so that it starts up, but immediately close it once it starts trying to sync the blockchain. This is in order to create your Bitcoin data directory.
(3)Download the
bootstrap torrent. This may take a few hours depending upon your Internet connection, but it will be much faster than downloading the historical blockchain within Bitcoin Core. You can learn more about the bootstrap file
here. Note that this step will no longer be necessary for Bitcoin Core version 0.10 and above because blockchain syncing has been parallelized across multiple peers and is now faster than bootstrapping from the file.
(4)While you’re waiting for the torrent to finish, you should configure your home’s router (assuming that you have one.) It’s critical that you forward port 8333 on your router to the IP address of the computer that is running your node. If you don’t do this, you will not be contributing your bandwidth to the network and should not run the node. You can check that your port forwarding works using the “check node” tool on
Bitnodes.io when your node is running. If you’re running a software firewall on the machine running the node, you’ll also want to ensure that you create a rule to open up port 8333.
(5)If you want to set up automatic monitoring of your node so that you will be alerted if it stops running, after using Bitnodes’ “check node” tool you can click on your node’s IP address to view its status page. At the bottom of the status page you can enter your email address to receive alerts when the node’s status changes.
(6)For your own convenience — to prevent your Bitcoin node from potentially saturating your home Internet connection — you may also wish to set throttling / QoS rules on your router or via software on the machine’s operating system. The procedure will vary from router to router and OS to OS; not all routers support it. If you’re running Linux, you can alternatively use
this bash script to limit the outgoing bandwidth allowed through port 8333. Just change the LIMIT variable to your desired throttled speed.
(7)Once the bootstrap torrent finishes downloading, move the bootstrap.dat file to your Bitcoin data directory.
On Windows, this is: \Users\YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
On Mac, this is: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/
On Linux, this is: ~/.bitcoin
(8)Run Bitcoin Core. Assuming that you’re running the graphical user interface, you’ll know that it is working on the bootstrap data because it will say “Importing blocks from disk.” If you’re running bitcoind you should be able to see the import occurring if you view the debug.log file in the Bitcoin data directory. Note that this process may take several hours and will be fairly intensive on your machine due to the verifications being performed upon the data.
(9)If you bootstrapped from the historical file, once the import completes, Bitcoin Core will rename the bootstrap file to “bootstrap.dat.old” and you should now delete it to free up hard drive space.
(10)You’re done! Now you just want to keep the machine online and make sure that you upgrade your node by installing new releases of Bitcoin Core.
