Running a full node on a macbook?

I'm thinking about running a bitcoind full node to help out the bitcoin network.

Would it be feasible to run a full node through one of the new macbooks?

(12", 250GB HD, 8GB RAM, 1.1 GHz Intel Core M processor)

thanks!

Tim Gregg

Posted 2016-01-12T19:54:42.150

Reputation: 31

Answers

It's certainly possible. I used to run a full bitcoind node on a 5 year old MacBook Air. I stopped (and moved it to a larger machine) because the size of the blockchain database was becoming annoying - it's currently 52 GB and always gets bigger. If you can spare the space, there's no problem with actually doing it.

Greg Hewgill

Posted 2016-01-12T19:54:42.150

Reputation: 3 321

thanks! 52GB is a little big for my hard drive! maybe I'll try on another device though. – Tim Gregg – 2016-01-12T20:12:37.537

Note that there's a pruning option that would limit your hard disk space usage to whatever you configure. Current pruning is a bit crude (and disables wallet functionatlity!), in the next versions it will be much better. – Jannes – 2016-01-13T09:47:28.373

You sure can. The trickiest part is the initial download of the full blockchain. It will take about ~4 days. It might be 52Gb but doing a Get Info will show 64Gb. You've got heaps of space though.

Hopefully you've seen: https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#mac-os-x-yosemite-1010x and you'll want to enable incoming connections: https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#enabling-connections

Then you should see yourself on this map here: https://bitnodes.21.co/#join-the-network once you're up and running.

cloudnthings

Posted 2016-01-12T19:54:42.150

Reputation: 357