A few nodes that caught my eye were bcoin and bitcore. Mainly due to the fact they are node.js which is a language I like to play around a bit with myself. Other than that are there any significant differences? My main criteria is to support segwit, can I do this as usual with bitcoin core or would I need to change some bitcoin core settings or will it just be a standard upgrade?
Thanks You
There's a couple things you should consider before depending on these implementations. Bitcoin is extremely consensus-critical, so using a client written in a different language than the reference implementation carries inherent risks. There likely exist edge cases which simply have not been seen in the wild yet with regard to bcoin which could end up costing you bitcoins.
There are also political considerations. Bcoin entered into a multi-million dollar agreement with Bitmain, Bitcoin.com and others earlier this year. Bitcore is developed by BitPay, and their actions around the Segwit2x hard fork were less than honorable. I would not trust either implementation to leave me on the correct chain by default in a contentious hard fork. So if you use these implementations, be very aware of current events re: forking and do not rely on default settings.
