Bitcoin Full Nodes to College Campuses

[music8mycomputer]

Hello, I am in the IT department at a college campus. I have been trying to get permission to run a full bitcoin node on campus using our wealth of resources. It has turned out to be harder than I thought. The main problem is how to justify using the college's resources to help Bitcoin. I was wondering if anyone had some good ideas of how to pitch this. I would like to create some sort of unified argument that all colleges and universities could use to present to the "higher ups" in order to gain permission to run a full bitcoin node. Any help would be appreciated.

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[shorena]

Hello, I am in the IT department at a college campus. I have been trying to get permission to run a full bitcoin node on campus using our wealth of resources. It has turned out to be harder than I thought. The main problem is how to justify using the college's resources to help Bitcoin. I was wondering if anyone had some good ideas of how to pitch this. I would like to create some sort of unified argument that all colleges and universities could use to present to the "higher ups" in order to gain permission to run a full bitcoin node. Any help would be appreciated.

Write thesis/paper about the blockchain that requires you to get blockchain data, get a prof. to sign that you need a server for this, install core.

[Jet Cash]

Just tell them it could be used for fundraising.

[worhiper_-_]

I hosted a BTC node in my school for a while but I had to limit its resources so it wouldn't cripple other software running on the hardware at rush hours. It got tiresome with all those stress test causing it to crash almost daily so I shut it down. All I had to do to convince my professors was to explain bitcoin's capabilities and how it's interesting technology helps solve certain problems other ungoverned internet currencies could not. If your professor is open minded and able to understand the role of bitcoin nodes he might let you do it as well.

Do your professors have experience with open source? A good point you could bring up is the fact that the code for bitcoin nodes has been reviewed by thousands of people. It's good at doing it's job while actively being checked for bugs by many experienced developers. But if your request is still denied then no biggie, your lessons are more important to you anyway.

[tyz]

A unified argument for all colleges is illusory in my opinion. As Sorena said try to write a paper, do research or just a do a project about bitcoin or blockchain on class. Then you will surely get the resources at least on your college.

[music8mycomputer]

Unfortunately I am not a student at this college but an employee.

[worhiper_-_]

Unfortunately I am not a student at this college but an employee.

Oh, I though you were a student at the IT dep. Well, that's a different question then. From my experience, I didn't have much success convincing people that bitcoin is great but they are convinced that it's an interesting technology nonetheless. I had to calculate how much bandwidth and hardware the node would use and then pointed our IT guy to a server with spare processing power. He thought that the idea of having a piece of software that relays financial transactions in our class was funny so he let me do it anyway despite the fact that he doesn't seem to think BTC is very viable.

[gotchay]

Definitely smart to get some numbers running on the cost of the hardware, electricity, bandwidth, and any other requirements needed to host the machine. As the others have stated, having a reason for running the node (research purposes) will be your best bet.

[shorena]

Unfortunately I am not a student at this college but an employee.

I this case I think you should be prepared to answer the question "why?".

[music8mycomputer]

Unfortunately I am not a student at this college but an employee.

I this case I think you should be prepared to answer the question "why?".

Which is the reason I came to bitcointalk.org. To brainstorm ideas on how to justify using resources to run a full node at a college campus.

[simon66]

How about make a petition that says something along the lines of "We the students would like a bitcoin full node so we have access to learn about this exciting and revolutionary new technology blah blah hype hype" and then go around to students, tell them about bitcoin and whatnot, and get them to sign it..

Then present the petition..

[Za1n]

Hello, I am in the IT department at a college campus. I have been trying to get permission to run a full bitcoin node on campus using our wealth of resources. It has turned out to be harder than I thought. The main problem is how to justify using the college's resources to help Bitcoin. I was wondering if anyone had some good ideas of how to pitch this. I would like to create some sort of unified argument that all colleges and universities could use to present to the "higher ups" in order to gain permission to run a full bitcoin node. Any help would be appreciated.

I bolded your main problem above. As others have already pointed out, you first need to rethink what you are doing and why. I think the better question would be "how to justify using your college's resources alongside Bitcoin to help your college."

As suggested by others, your best course of action would be to get the assistance of either a computer science professor, or perhaps an economics professor, to help justify why your college should begin investigating bitcoin. I think pursuing it from an educational angle would make the most sense, however I suppose you could also try to convince them that they could use it to accept donations, or even perhaps tuition payments, although the later suggestions probably wouldn't fly as well as the first.

There are already several colleges teaching about bitcoin, and more specifically the block-chain technology. You may want to emphasis the block-chain in any presentations, and simply refer to Bitcoin as an example of this technology rather than be the main focus.

[7788bitcoin]

As mentioned above, the question is WHY? You can choose run it at home.

Anyway, you can get a Raspberry Pi and the cost of electricity won't be high. Just need the network and the cost of the equipment.

[music8mycomputer]

As mentioned above, the question is WHY? You can choose run it at home.

Anyway, you can get a Raspberry Pi and the cost of electricity won't be high. Just need the network and the cost of the equipment.

I wish I could run it at home but I have a metered connection. The Raspberry Pi 2 full node is great for home use but being able to tap into resources at a college campus with blazing internet speeds and possibly spare server resources should be able to do more to help the network. There is a leaderboard here: https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/leaderboard/?q=.edu filtered by .edu domains that shows there's about 12 colleges, or at least domains with .edu, that have full nodes. One of them is in the number one spot. I'd be curious to see how a raspberry pi scores.

[shorena]

Unfortunately I am not a student at this college but an employee.

I this case I think you should be prepared to answer the question "why?".

Which is the reason I came to bitcointalk.org. To brainstorm ideas on how to justify using resources to run a full node at a college campus.

I - probably same as you - have a hard time to think about a reason. Maybe you charge for something that could potentially be paid in bitcoin, e.g. credits for printing or other campus services. That however could easily be done with bitpay or something like that without the need to run a full node. It would also be difficult to get such a project rolling, because of the potential changes required to existing systems.

I still think it would be better to approach student/professor projects that can run servers, be that for research or other reasons. The economics department might also be someone to contact, now that every second bank is talking about "blockchain tech".

Edit:

...or maybe you can rent/buy rack space/a VPS in the university datacenter. Depending on the price you might need to group buy it among interested colleagues. If you need to get hardware, a used server should easily handle running a full node.

[doof]

The biggest problem is getting IT Security to port forward 8333 to the node.

[music8mycomputer]

The biggest problem is getting IT Security to port forward 8333 to the node.

Yes, this is pretty much the biggest issue since it is the only thing keep me from running it in my office. I have talked with our security team and there doesn't seem to be too much security risk involved if it is done properly. It would be on a vlan that is separated from the rest of campus.