Whilst I’m not actively following cryptocurrency anymore, I did previously tinker with Bitcoin so I’m familar with how it works, and why the currency form is so appealing. Which I means I do actually support it’s use. The only thing I don’t like about it, is the mining power that is consumed and the worldwide power consumption from it. I’d prefer that kind of power was used for solving real world problems like Drug Discovery, and AI.
Anyway, running your own node is good, because you help support the network and make it more resilient verifying transactions. You can verify information locally and your data remains secure.
The down point to running your own node, is the bandwidth and disk space required.
For the moment I decided to just download the node blockchain. There are a couple of options when downloading the block chain. The full block chain which is everything, and a reduced size one.
I decided to download the full block chain, as I wanted to install it on a Raspberry PI to eventually run as a node accessible over the internet. Which means I needed to download a large amount of files to my computer.
How big is the Bitcoin node blockchain?
Currently, as of this post (1st Feb 2026). The full block chain size that I downloaded was 722GB in size (around 16500 block chains) as the file downloads 1 per hour, per day since Bitcoin was formed. As you are tracking every transaction since it first started.
Why did I download the full Bitcoin node?
Previously, when I have downloaded the node on my old PC. It would progress, then eventually come up with an error message similar to “Bitcoin node failed to verify blockstate, rebuild database”. Or something to that effect.
Now, I’m not sure what causes it perhaps it’s to do with the write speed of the HDD, as my previous HDD was SATA, and my current one in my new PC is NVME and I never had one problem downloading it.
Now, onto the reason why I downloaded the full node. Eventually I’m going to get an external NVME drive, and then something like a Raspberry PI 5. I’ll then transfer the files over to the NVME and install a SIM module onto the Raspberry PI. Or alternatively run a Cloudflare tunnel to it, so that files can be accessed over the internet. So that eventually it would be accessible as a datanode on bitnodes.io or sites similar to this.
Anyone who has downloaded the block chain knows how long it takes to do. When you first launch the Bitcoin Core, it has to download everything since the beginning (about 2011). I have an internet connection which is 900Mbps with Youfibre, and it still took around 18 hours to download everything to my computer.
Due to the problems I’ve had previously. I’ve kept a couple of backups on external HDD in the worst case that I need to rebuild the array I dont’ have to download everything again. I can spend the time copying it over my local LAN and get up and running.
The 2nd reason that I wanted to do, was to host all the files for the node on a local Torrent Server. This is basically to help other people with their Bitcoin Node because when they have a problem with a file, they can basically download the individual files they want. Rather than the full node.
I opted against this as whilst torrents are legal, Youfibre seems to be a bit iffy with them quoting acceptable usage policy. I could counteract this and simply limit upload speed to 10Mbps which means traffic would be limited and it wouldn’t affect my bandwidth too much. I decided against this as I can simply upload the files online to somewhere that offers storage space. The node would then just be part of my Homelab network that I’m building
