Advice on running a Bitcoin node

[#1]

A hopefully quick question here, I'm a long time Bitcoin enthusiast and I'm considering running a network node.

I've trawled this site already and I have found someone running a node back in 2013 that shows network traffic is likely to be prioritised below internet surfing and streaming (Silver channel ?) but nothing else and I'm worried about useage.  Today a bitcoin node can hog quite a bit of traffic and while I've the "Unlimited Fibre Extra" package so I think I have the bandwidth I think I might hit "fair use" caps for useage.  I've seen suggestions that a regular full node can run into 30-60GB upload per day though this can be reduced my limiting the number of outgoing connections.  There is some download useage but beyond the initial network sync it's not as significant as the upload.

So first up is there likely to be an issue with "30-60GB upload per day" estimate and will I be hitting any caps or useage red flags ?  Also is there a policy in place already that applies here ?

For the technically minded and the curious this link is to a status dashboard for a running node.  It's a bit of an extreme example though as it has 100+ connected peers and looks to have shifted/uploaded 1.66 terrabytes in just the last 12 hours (!!).

http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/bandwidth-usage

Cheers

[#2]

I don't think that capacity will be your biggest issue TBH if anything it will be what power you're offering to the pool. You need serious hardware to do mining, the days of i7s and GPU arrays have passed even some of the dedicated hardware is now deprecated!

[#3]

I'm not planning to do any mining, just runing a full node.

There's a couple of competing implementations at the moment so I'm wanting to do my bit by adding a Bitcoin Unlimited node to the network.  Not sure what'll run it on yet, got a old Pi kicking around but I'm not sure it's up to the job and then there's the storage needs !

[#4 · Accepted solution]

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 So first up is there likely to be an issue with "30-60GB upload per day" estimate and will I be hitting any caps or useage red flags ?  Also is there a policy in place already that applies here ?

You might run in to issues if the projected usage rises (up and down) to more than 30TB per month.

[#5]

It would appear you have read this article but in case you haven't https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node

[#6]

Ok thanks both

I had read the article thanks and there are things I can do to reduce useage but I was fishing for any "fair use" limits.  If that's around 30TB a month then I should be easily within that.  I might start at a limit of 10 connections and increase the cap bit by bit.

Cheers

[#7]

there aren't any fair use limits and 30GB isn't trying

[#8]

Well it's 30 TB not GB and upload too so I thought it was worth checking since ISPs don't usually expect much upload useage.  That said we live in the days of the cloud and dropbox etc so I might be out of date !

Edit : For the example linked above with 100 connections assuming 3TB a day useage then that's 90TB a month in a 30 day period

[#9]

The default number of connections is, as you know 8, so if you're looking to run 100 then you'll need more than a Pi

[#10]

Yeah I think I'll be starting with the default

[#11]

I would be interested how much of the 30TB usage you expect to be upload given that an 80/20 fibre running at full blast 24/7 will only use about 6.5TB/month and that will screw up your normal browsing

[#12]

Well to get into the detail I don't actually expect to be hitting anything like 30TB.  First I'll be limiting the number of active connections, also the version of the Bitcoin node software I'm planning to run has some enchancements to reduce the data useage (though in reality I'm not sure how much benefit this will have) and I might not be running this 24hrs a day (maybe 2:00am till 7:00pm) to avoid this clashing with streaming.

I'm not sure if there will be a direct clash with normal browsing since I've seen a suggestion that Plusnet give the Bitcoin node traffic a lower prioity (Silver) than regular http/https traffic (Gold).

Either way I'm just fact finding at this stage