Running My First Bitcoin Node – My Experience & Setup Guide

[Localhostspeed]

If you need help on setting it up let me know or reply here if u have any issue  Good luck

Thank you, I will do that, of course but I don't know if I would love to switch from my full node to a pruned one.

Don't try it. The only reason why you should be running prune node is if you don't want your disk storage be occupied by the blocks you download during the sync. You wouldn't be able to propagate old transactions.

I was about trying to checky node if I can call a transaction that happen years ago and it gave me nothing. It was later I remembered that the transaction was not on my node because I'm running a prune node. I will get an external ssd to run the full node and allow my PC disk storage be prune. Anytime I feel like running latest transaction, I will be using only that.

[DYING_S0UL]

... but I don't know if I would love to switch from my full node to a pruned one.

If you have the resources to run a full (non-pruned) node and want to keep it that way, why would you want to switch to a pruned one? The mentioned Bitcoin node challenge doesn't require to use a pruned node, this is optional.

Many participants of the node challenge simply use a pruned node because this is less storage space hungry, especially when their main interest are likely the merit points and not so much running a Bitcoin node permanently.

Would you mind answering is it possible to switch from pruned node to full node and vise versa? My previous potato laptop didn't have the enough storage to run the full node, so I used.to run it in pruned node mode. But my current build has sufficient space to store the entire thing. Though I still am using pruned node, (had to delete everything because I messed up), redownloading everything. Been wondering whether I can switch. I'm not any expert. Lastly both are the same right? I mean are there any advantage or disadvantage?

[Cricktor]

...

I haven't tried this myself because I rarely had the need to run a pruned node (did it once on a virtual machine where storage space was limited because the host system didn't have enough itself).

From documentation and what has been said about pruned nodes in this forum (I might not have read everything about it) this is my understanding how it works:

Full node switch to pruned:

• no new IBD will happen
• block storage will be pruned to desired limit discarding oldest history, but required data for loaded wallets histories will be kept as needed

Pruned node switch to full/non-pruned:

• a new IBD will be started to fetch the whole blockchain

Pruned node switch to smaller pruned node:

• should be the same as with "Full node to pruned"

Pruned node switch to larger pruned node limits:

• (not sure) likely no new IBD will happen
• Core allows block storage data to grow until new larger limits are reached
• pruned node size grows slowly to new higher limits with new blocks pouring in
• to my best knowledge (could be wrong) no older blockchain history will be downloaded to extend the oldest history data to new higher limits

The storage size requirement for the UTXO set, the chainstate directory, is always the same regardless if full or pruned node and needs currently around ~11GiB (my full node shows currently 10.697GiB space consumption to be more accurate).

I don't see a reason why you can't switch back and forth, whether this makes sense is on another page. I prefer to run a full node because the IBD has to be done anyway and is time and especially I/O demanding. I don't see a good reason to stress my SSD storage with multiple IBDs for no good reasons.