Target Audience
This guide should be of keen interest to everyone who cares about self-sovereignty, freedom, privacy, the peer-to-peer web, and human flourishing.
It should be of interest to every Bitcoiner.
Who Is This For?
However, not all those people will find that actually doing this guide is for them, or for them yet. This is for seasoned node operators who would like to level up their node, or who are beginning to feel they should level up their node. What is more, it will be deeply helpful to have experience in software engineering and Linux.
That said, this guide assumes:
- You do not know how to code
- But you are comfortable reading and reasoning through code
- And you are comfortable at the command line
If you have completed the excellent RaspiBolt guide you will be well positioned to approach this guide. In fact, that guide should be considered a required prerequisite to this guide.
However, we must stipulate that philosophically the guides do differ a bit. It is prudent and reasonable, when provisioning one node, to embrace ideas like "do everything ourselves", but this becomes an impasse when its "do everything ourselves 7 times, for each computer". We will still strive to "give foolproof instructions", explain things, and will strive to never ask you to run code which we also do not provide a source and explanation for.
To give you a taste of what you are about to embark on, the RaspiBolt guide provisions one computer by using the terminal to run dozens of commands. This guide uses concepts like Infrastructure As Code that can use one command in the terminal to provision dozens of computers.
Unless you already have a budget set aside, or already have spare computers ready to go, HAB Nodes multiply expenses by multiplying hosts. The power and engineering that goes into a HAB Node is no joke, and at the end of the day you will have spent money well, but do set a budget before continuing on this project, for it very easily could spiral out of hand.
At a minimum, 3 sufficient computers will need to be networked together with a router that has internet access, and a control computer will be needed to facilitate the project.
Who Is This Not For?
If you are not running a singular (or multiple, non-clustered), self-hosted bitcoin node(s), this guide may not be for you. You should do that first (again, use the RaspiBolt guide), get the lay of the land, and after some time, come back.
It is far more important for Bitcoin and your own understanding in the space to run a simple and cheap full node first. Running a simple and cheap full node is a deep and fundamental part of the bitcoin ecosystem that ALL participants should participate in, an excellent learning experience, and one you should approach in a way that you know will not overwhelm you.
A HAB node DOES NOT help entry level node operators get closer to that goal—it would be like learning to fly an airplane before learning to ride a bike. Well, at least this is true presently. We believe that, eventually, we should be able to get HAB Nodes from friendly GUIs, where indeed, it might be as easy as ridding a bike.
But for now, let us reiterate this point, but in a friendly red color:
This should not be anyone's first node unless they are already a Site Reliability Engineer, or have other real operational experience with servers and/or container orchestration.
Is This For You?
Given all the above, we dearly hope that this guide is for you.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of hardware and code we must first survey what we are going to do.