Bitcoin Full Node on FreeBSD

What is a Bitcoin?
What is a Bitcoin Wallet?
What is a Blockchain?
What is Mining?
What is Pooled Mining?
What is a Full Node?
What is a Bitcoind?
How To Start Bitcoind To Be Full Node?

What is a Bitcoin ?

Bitcoin is a valuable popular open-source cryptocurrency that was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Bitcoins have value because they possess same characteristics like money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability), but based on the properties of mathematics rather than on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies). In short, Bitcoin is backed by mathematics.
Bitcoin is the first decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that is controlled by its users.
Transactions take place directly between users, and are later verified by network nodes with digital signature and then placed in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Bitcoin is unique in that only 21 million bitcoins will ever be created. The unit of the bitcoin system is bitcoin or mBTC.

What is a Bitcoin Wallet ?

A wallet is nothing more than a pair of public and private keys that are created by a client to store the digital credentials for your bitcoin.

• There are several types of wallets:
• Desktop Wallet
• Token Wallet
• Online Wallet
• Mobile Wallet

A token wallet is the safest way to work with bitcoin network, but you can use your mobile or pc as a bitcoin wallet.

What is a Blockchain?

A blockchain is a ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The blockchain is a distributed database that achieves independent verification of the chain of ownership. Each network node stores its own copy of the blockchain. Transactions will broadcast on the bitcoin network, and about 2400 transactions create a block. These blocks are building blocks of the blockchain.

What is Mining?

Mining is the process of dedicating computing power to process transactions, secure the network, and keep everyone in the system synchronized together. It has been designed to be fully decentralized.
Miners need mining software with specialized hardware. Mining software listens for transactions broadcasted through the peer-to-peer network and performs appropriate tasks to process and confirm these transactions. Bitcoin miners perform this work because they can earn transaction fees paid by users for faster transaction processing.
New transactions have to be confirmed then be included in a block along with a mathematical proof of work. Such proofs are very hard to generate because there is no way to create them other than by trying billions of calculations per second. Hence, miners are required to perform these calculations before their blocks are accepted by the network and before they are rewarded. As more people start to mine, the difficulty of finding valid blocks is automatically increased by the network to ensure that the average time to find a block remains equal to 10 minutes. As a result, mining is a very competitive business where no individual miner can control what is included in the blockchain.
The proof of work is also designed to depend on the previous block to force a chronological order in the blockchain. This makes it exponentially difficult to reverse previous transactions because it would require the recalculation of the proofs of work of all the subsequent blocks. When two blocks are found at the same time, miners work on the first block they receive and switch to the longest chain of blocks as soon as the next block is found. This allows mining to secure and maintain a global consensus based on processing power.

What is Pooled Mining?

You have more chances if you participate with others to create a block. In a pool, all participating miners get paid every time a participating server solves a block. The payment depends on the amount of work an individual miner contributed to help find that block.

What is a Full Node?

A full node is a client that fully validates transactions and blocks. Full nodes also help the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further full nodes.
Many people and organizations volunteer to run full nodes using spare computing and bandwidth resources.

What is a Bitcoind?

bitcoind is a Bitcoin client under the MIT license in 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Windows, GNU/Linux-based OSes, Mac OS X, OpenBSD and FreeBSD as well.

How To Start Bitcoind To Be Full Node?

Install bitcoind by PKG:

#pkg install bitcoin-daemon

Install bitcoind by source:

#fetch https://github.com/UASF/bitcoin/archive/v0.14.2-uasfsegwit1.0.tar.gz
 #tar xzvf v0.14.2-uasfsegwit1.0.tar.gz
 #cd bitcoin-0.14.2-uasfsegwit1.0

Install dependencies:

#pkg install autoconf automake libtool pkgconf boost-libs openssl libevent gmake

Then config build and install Bitcoind:

#./autogen.sh
 #./configure –without-gui

Since we are in command line, GUI is not required and –without-gui will disable it.

#gmake
 #gmake install

Start Bitcoind client and wait full-sync with other nodes:

#bitcoind -daemon

bitcoind will download database that is about 150GB. You can check your node status by clicking on this URL: https://bitnodes.earn.com

Conclusion

Cryptocurrencies are replacement for banking we know today, and bitcoin is the game changer. Mining bitcoin with typical hardware is not a good idea. It needs specialized devices like ASIC, but you can create a full node and help the bitcoin network.

Useful Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency
https://bitcoin.org/en/faq

About the Author

Abdorrahman Homaei has been working as a software developer since 2000. He has used FreeBSD for more than ten years. He was involved with the meetBSD dot ir and performed serious trainings on FreeBSD. He started his company, etesal amne sara tehran, in Feb 2017, and it is based in Iran Silicon Valley.
Full CV: http://in4bsd.com
His company: http://corebox.ir