Your bitcoin node is like a condom machine in the Vatican
How the core of what bitcoin would be built on, is rotting away
From the very beginning, “running a Bitcoin node” was the main thing for most of us, to be part of the Bitcoin revolution.
I’ve run it on old computers, even on one of the first Android phones I’ve ever had (back when you could run things like Mycelium and early Bitcoin software on your phone, pruned or otherwise).
It was important to be a node in the network, validating blocks and inspecting transactions so everyone followed the rules.
We’ve come a long way since those early days.
We saw hardware getting cheaper, we saw the blockchain grow in size, and we had higher bandwidth, HD addresses, hardware wallets and a whole series of brands delivering products to help us use bitcoin.
But we also saw more surveillance, censorship, and a series of relentless attacks on Bitcoin through capturing more and more of what makes Bitcoin unique.
Unfortunately for us, the basic node software kept being stuck in the early days’ era. What should be an onboarding tool after wallets on the forefront, turned into a steep learning curve. Free node software is a growing curb that many can’t overcome anymore.
Compared, running a bitcoin node for many average users is more like running Linux Suse 6 at this point. It just doesn’t match for most people.
On top of that we get the extra political drama like the “Knots vs. Core” discussion, which adds to the dismal state running a node as a concept, is in.
Fast forward to late 2025, the “corporate era” (meaning the overly reliant way Bitcoiners listen to the Wall Street people and visit corporate conferences where the main point is selling middlemen services and gimmicks) is in full swing… and I decided to opt out. I don’t run my own node anymore.
And yes, I realize this goes against all we’re supposed to do in Bitcoin; in essence, I’m not “part of Bitcoin” anymore as my node went dark.
The story goes that, without running your own node, you’re no longer making decisions, deciding the future of Bitcoin, and even can’t independently verify transactions and UTXOs.
Well... that’s not entirely the case anymore in my opinion.
Next to the earlier conclusions about orange pilling as a mental issue, and why you probably don’t need a hardware wallet, we can now also add the fact that you probably don’t need to run your own node anymore.
Because we’re past the time that it made any real meaningful difference, unfortunately.
Most of the Bitcoiners will stop reading here.
As the dogma and fixed scripture of our cult demands to run a node and not question it anymore. After all, running a bitcoin node is our raison d’être.
It’s what gives us* control?
[ *us : the notion that bitcoiners have to be one network, one community with all kinds of different people that rally after one consensus mechanism without central governance. While the “us” is quickly an afterthought when we follow the same few leaders that define the industry from their corporate headquarters and invest free fiat to take “our” asset over]
Let me break it down, for those that are not the loyal follower of the prominent voices.
Here’s why I think running a node is no longer essential…
Bitcoin node software sucks
Running a node is, more than ever, a choice.
Choices between having a good user interface from a private company and their implementation, usually coming with its own hardware, rules, and shipped to your door. Or some that even run in some cloud setup.
And a free version that plainly sucks and comes with political baggage we can all do without.
On the private company side, we have brands like Umbrel, MyNode, Start9, Nodl, Casa, Voltage…
These nodes are mainly there for giving the consumer (because that’s what you are) a good feeling and a way to interact with the Bitcoin Core implementation in a way that’s understandable.
The main reason for you paying these companies (middlemen) to deliver this is convenience, since the main free option lacks proper, workable documentation that really works for every end user. Even for technical people, it’s often hard to work with, since most commands are flat-out not working in the console even if you copy-paste them directly from their own outdated and untested documentation). And good luck trying to connect other services and wallets to a bitcoin core. Most users won’t ever get that to work anyway.
So, in other words, you need some of these in-between companies to actually work with this stuff. And you’ll pay for that privilege. And the question remains, do you -as a Bitcoiner- still run a node out of habit, tradition, or even to still look up some data you think is better kept private?
Or do you really still hold on to the illusion that you help the network?
The main culprit for this situation is the downright bad interface and implementation of the free and open-source versions. Give any new person in Bitcoin who’s not really tech-savvy the Bitcoin Core or Bitcoin Knots node software and let them find a way to get a private key from one of their Bitcoin addresses, for example.
The excuses I’ve heard for over 10 years now are always the same: “it’s not for noobs”, “it’s not for non-techies”, there are “alternatives with a better interface”, and so on.
I detest these remarks. If running a node is so damned crucial for bitcoin, why is the free open-source software that’s supposed to run it still failing to deliver a smooth, easy install and maintenance experience? It should be as easy as running Spotify.
But the fact remains that the very core (pun intended) of being a Bitcoiner is running a node… while the node software is less than ideal to maintain.
On top of that, it costs you energy (a bit of electricity) and hardware (you’ll need a decent hard drive, with a backup and a decent internet connection, preferably behind a firewall, as you will be attacked, probed, scanned, and possibly hacked within 24 hours when you put a node online without proper precautions).
And of course, your internet provider (and the state system) will know your IP, name, and the fact that you run a node (yes, even behind a VPN).
So, running a free node on your own as a private person gives you a real-life monetary cost and other disadvantages. These outweigh the use it has, you’re a small fish in a big pond, and there are not many other small fish even interested in swimming next to you.
While you might think that’s still worth it, please read on, because it isn’t.
The growth of reachable nodes tells us mainly that there is success. But not the success we need to have a worldwide network with new users coming online all the time. We see new nodes. Yes. I’m curious how many of these are company nodes, or things like Umbrel.
For context, a 2021 article noted that over 12,970 Lightning Network nodes were running on Umbrel servers. This suggests that the overall growth in Bitcoin nodes may not primarily stem from Core/Knots free node software.
The growth would be exponentially bigger when we had a free to use, clear, basic good software instead of Core/Knots (I name them as one, because they’re in fact equally bad).
Bitcoin node software doesn’t give you power
The second argument is that Bitcoin nodes give you decision power. You feel great by being part of a worldwide network that can make decisions on what transaction rules are adhered to by the users. A node is in fact powerful, it validates a block’s structure, verifies the transactions therein, propagates the blocks and rejects invalid ones. You can also use it to broadcast your transaction.
Node function on itself is of course not the problem. A node’s function is what makes bitcoin what we love.
The “network” with all these nodes, ideally is made up of all kinds of individuals appreciating their freedom and cypherpunk ethos, forming a judge of the consensus rules worldwide.
That was the case once. When real people ran real nodes from their homes and sometimes had multiple nodes running for redundancy, to help the network from different geographical locations. Decentralization is vital.
The number of nodes isn’t exactly known (that’s a good thing), as many aren’t publicly reachable or have other means to conceal themselves.
A good estimate is 20,000 to 55,000 worldwide. Probably half of them run on Amazon AWS or other “big tech” services.
At the time of writing (September 29, 2025), there were about 21,200 reachable public nodes. And of these, about 44% were running on Amazon, DigitalOcean, Google, etc.
For comparison, in networks like Ethereum, the number of validating nodes on the cloud services is even higher, hovering around 65%, although it’s a shitcoin and a failed experiment in Proof-of-Stake as a service, it gives us some sort of idea.
With the growing need for capacity and bandwidth, as well as hard drive maintenance and redundancy, the bitcoin nodes moved more and more to the cloud. Any entity (a miner, for example) can spin up as many nodes as they can pay for.
An individual can only run 1, maybe 2, behind a slower connection (certainly behind a Tor network connection), and if they really want, they can set up more nodes themselves.
If you come to think of it, it’s rather overestimating your impact by a factor of 10,000% or so to think that you, as a lonely node maintainer, have any real impact.
The decision-making factor for a node is minimal these days. You can filter spam, you can throw out NFTs, you can do whatever you like… while the miners will just set their own pick-and-choose rules and let their own nodes adhere to these (or other) rules anyway.
If I want to use an OP_RETURN message of 1,500 bytes, instead of 80 bytes, then I can do so by creating such a message, including my OP_RETURN, and a miner will pick it up (if I pay).
And even more, if a miner wants to include a 1-megabyte JPEG in there, they’ll gladly let their own nodes create, validate it, and their miners will pick the block including that particular transaction.
The individual with an old laptop running Bitcoin Knots, for example, will have little influence on that. Even when a certain set of predefined default rules would be running on 60% of the nodes.
If miners would ever see problems, they’d just fire up a few (or hundreds of) nodes themselves with different rules. Miners also can bypass node policies altogether through the use of private mempools or direct transaction submission, like MARA’s Slipstream.
The function for broadcasting your transactions privately, can also be done through submitting your offline signed transaction on services like mempool.space, coinb.in and so on. If you want, you can use a VPN to connect to these. If you keep your node online, just for broadcasting, it’s not necessary at all.
You as a lonely node running bitcoiner would be right if (and only if) you could get at least 15,000 more people like yourself to join in with individual nodes.
And face it; most people have heard of Bitcoin by now, and most of them (99.9%+) decided to not run a node.
Sadly, most of you don’t even have that number of followers on social media, let alone you’ll start to convince real people to run nodes for a long enough time to make an impact. Face it: you don’t scale.
It’s like starting a vegetable garden in the Sahara desert at this point. If you’re the only one, it will fail. If you find 15000 others to do the same, it might even work and have a good impact.
But to what end and at what cost? Your individual contribution is very negligible, unless you could find thousands of more people to run a node just like you.
On the contrary. Even if you convince someone that Bitcoin is a good asset, they’ll hardly even look at running a node themselves. Or they’ll try and fail without help because the software sucks as hard as a 20 dollar hooker on a sailor’s payday (pun intended). It’s not that it’s fun and cool software to be running.
The idea of a network of individuals all running a node and using Bitcoin is as good as dead.
I wish it was different. But that’s the reality today (if you don’t accept it, that’s your choice, it will cost you time and money before you realize the same fact, just like you’ve probably realized a few years later that bitcoin was a good asset).
And by the way; … guess which door the government regimes will ever kick in to get to you as a Bitcoiner who runs their own node… not the glass doors of the Google or Amazon datacenters, I assure you. (these people will just click the off switch, and happy to do so if necessary)
It might seem far-fetched now, but so was the idea of police in the UK showing up at any citizen’s doorstep to arrest some children for the content of a social media post they’ve sent.
Babysitting nodes is tiresome.
Babysitting nodes is downright draining. Running a full node is already a hassle, but tack on a Lightning node and it’s flat-out absurd. On top of the usual costs—electricity, hardware, and a decent internet connection—you’re stuck dealing with the added risks to your Bitcoin holdings and the constant need to watch out for bad actors trying to exploit your setup. The folks running these setups either need to go full-on professional, with proper resources and know-how, or just throw in the towel. It’s not a hobby for the faint-hearted anymore.
Privacy
The privacy of looking up balances, UTXOs, or other things on your own node is, of course, a key argument for die-hard maintainers of a private bitcoin node.
Many people claim they’re using their privately run node to “look up info” on the Bitcoin blockchain locally. When you look up the balance of your Bitcoin address on your own node, no one knows that you did that.
Compare that to using a service like mempool.space, where your metadata could be logged, along with your possible connection to that address.
But here’s the catch: since all transactions and address use are public on the Bitcoin blockchain, you’ll sooner or later leak some data anyway given the nature of the current internet situation.
You can be very prudent, you can even never leak anything yourself. But the chain analysis will eventually get to you.
Let me explain this for the people who don’t realize it yet: you can be as anonymous, private, and hidden as you want with a private node; that’s true.
You can look up your addresses 100% of the time purely on that private node of yours.
And sooner or later, you’ll leak data, either through being forced to do so, through middlemen, or due to your own one-time stupidity, laziness or some tech going wrong.
There aren’t that many people doing this 100% “by the book”.
Installing a node from software they’ve compiled themselves in secret, on some air-gapped machine that never comes online anymore after that, wiping your RAM, or moving the installation to a secret location, behind a firewall and VPN and what not, only to occasionally use it to look up their Bitcoin addresses even being careful to not leak data through sandboxed browsers?
And if some users do all that... kudos to them. They WILL make a mistake somewhere and be exposed. Even more so, the sheer necessity of running a node as if you’re the main protagonist of the movie Enemy of the State should be a dead giveaway that you’re doing something that’s too elaborate to be handy for the average user (doesn’t make it wrong or right, just unhandy).
And I do hope you don’t live in a Faraday cage like Edward “Brill”.
Hence the fact that there are 8 billion people on the planet, and only about 10,000 to 15,000 real humans run individual nodes.
And from all these people, probably not even 500 do it the way it’s considered really private.
You’re all alone... Eddy.
You can just look up stuff (you can still use a VPN to do so) on the known block explorers. Or use the ones you trust from whatever company you deem worthy. It’s all over anyway as long we’re dwindling further down the corporate era where retail is close to decimated and Microstrategy is pumping more free fiat in the system with no one joining the party at that level.
Finally
Running a node, just like orange pilling, is over.
Running a Bitcoin node makes you a nostalgic person who’s willingly spending time and money (hardware, electricity, maintenance, backup, redundancy, security, sleepless nights, …), while increasing your privacy exposure only to support a network that’s mainly used for an asset that’s currently nothing more than the funny money playground for manipulated prices in a paper-Bitcoin / free fiat-sponsored racketeering scheme by some Wall Street people that I wouldn’t even trust to hold my soda can for a minute.
They’ll tell you otherwise at conferences (where they’ll ask you $100 to $1200 entrance fee unless you’re one of the coke-sniffing in-crowd or their friends) for the privilege of buying their nonsense ghost-written books and “military grade” gimmicks you’ll need to replace within the year.
And yes, you can feel great about that. Wear the hoodie and smile alongside your stuffed animals of choice.
Running code always feels great, doesn’t it?
Until it becomes just a figment of your imagination, like buying a refurbished Nintendo GameBoy to relive your childhood.
You’ll slowly become the Bitcoin equivalent of an elderly person praying a Hail Mary in church for healing their ill family members.
It feels good to do it. You’ll even buy a new rosary and burn a green candle from time to time.
The only difference is that praying is free. And there’s no paper prayers flooding the market.
Do you want to know why there are only a few thousand real node-running Bitcoiners in the world? Because the current node software is subpar and lacks usability.
Ninety percent of users can’t even connect their wallet to a Bitcoin Core node on their local LAN because the developers seem unaware of usability concepts.
From there, all other problems follow.
Options:
Adopt high-quality, user-friendly node software, or Bitcoin will increasingly be overtaken by corporate vultures and their ilk.
The choice between pulling the plug on your node (and potentially losing 20 to 50% of human-run nodes in a massive protest) would make it clear that corporate bitcoiners will be left with worthless, centralized, no-trust “bitcoin.”
Alternatively, we could see decentralized, functional, high-quality alternatives that combine good UX, independence, and ease of running/understanding, without being third-party bloatware (see Umbrel…).
In other words, who will save bitcoin by finally creating a workable, high-quality node with excellent UX?
I say we go for “no bloat, in our node.”
The alternative is that you’re truly committed to helping the Bitcoin network and join a corporation to change it from the inside like a slick suit. Good luck with that. I hope you got some excellent venture capitalist contacts or family.
More realistically, you could recognize your position, unplug in protest, and move on.
In that case, the message would be clear: bitcoin would sort of die unless the powers-that-be develop better onboarding methods and good nodes (they sure have the deep pockets to do so).
The ball is in their camp, if the human-ran nodes unplug by the thousands.
If you’re a cabal of corporations trying to corner this market, then also do the work to keep it alive and kicking. But they even fail to do that. I guess standing on a stage and saying the most ridiculous one-liners is cheaper and “scales” better than 10+ year old crappy software.
The third option is more costly and requires smart people to develop a high-quality, functional alternative that surpasses the outdated, user-unfriendly Bitcoin Core and Knots in terms of usability. As said before, it should be as smooth as installing Spotify or Steam.
The commands (if you need them) need to work as documented. It should have a good intuitive user interface and a solid architecture without bloatware, shitcoins and middlemen-control.
A re-invention of Bitcoin Core, natural and with clear opt-in rules.
If we do nothing, we will stay in this purgatory of having not enough human-run nodes to have real impact, and just enough nodes to keep bitcoin alive.
Yet, just like that condom machine, there won’t be many users onboarded.
BTC Villain
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@avb_21