Ticker to Node with a Sprinkle of Code

Bitcoin nodes are great. They strengthen the network while allowing you to interact with it with more privacy and more security. You become self-sovereign as you no longer need to rely on third parties when interacting with the blockchain.

The sheer handsomeness of our tickerXL made us want it to do something a little more involved than report prices. Making it into a node, is the obvious level-up.

Steps:

We replaced the Pi Zero on the back of the ticker with the node hardware (heatsink, Raspberry Pi 4 and 1 TB SSD hard drive), made a couple of code adjustments and got the ticker running with a full Bitcoin/ Lightning RaspiBlitz node. It took about 30 minutes (with an already-synced node).

Disclaimer: These are the basic steps, but there will be a version of these install instructions on our GitHub page which will be more actively maintained than this outline.

• Build a Raspiblitz node

• Replace the Pi Zero WH in the ticker with the node hardware

• Login over ssh and install code in the home directory for pi

• Add a systemd service to run the ticker code

• Reboot

That’s it. If you can, then you should run a node.