Okay, so check this out—running a full node is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually live with it. It’s empowering. It’s also a little tedious sometimes. If you’ve already run nodes before, this is for you: focused, practical, and opinionated. I’ll be honest: I’m biased toward running a fully validating, non-pruned node when feasible, but I’ll walk you through the tradeoffs so you can choose what fits your threat model and resources.

First things first—what does a good node do? It downloads and verifies every block and transaction from genesis, enforces consensus rules independently, validates scripts, and serves blocks and transactions to peers and wallets. A node is your independent, verifiable view of Bitcoin. That’s the whole point. If you’re running one for privacy, censorship-resistance, or to support your own services, you want reliability more than bells and whistles.

Hardware baseline: don’t skimp on storage I/O. An SSD with good sustained write performance and 500GB–2TB of space is the usual sweet spot for a full archival node today (more if you keep indexes or archives). CPU isn’t usually a bottleneck for steady-state validation, but it matters during Initial Block Download (IBD) and reindexing—a modern multi-core CPU helps. Memory: 8–16GB is reasonable for most setups; more helps mempool-heavy workloads and indexing. Network: a stable, uncapped upstream is ideal—expect several hundred GB during IBD and tens of GB monthly thereafter.

Config choices and bitcoin core

If you haven’t already, get the official client: bitcoin core — build from release binaries or compile yourself if you want reproducible builds and extra confidence. Use a dedicated data directory. If you plan to expose RPC to other services, bind it to localhost and protect it with a strong rpcuser/rpcpassword or cookie auth; avoid opening RPC to the network.

Pruning vs archival — pick your stance. Pruned nodes are great for limited storage and still validate everything on-the-fly, but they can’t serve historical blocks to peers or support features that require full history (indexers, some analytic tools). Archival nodes cost more in disk but are useful if you run explorers, chain analysis, or want full block-serving capability. Personally, I run one archival node and a couple of pruned secondaries for redundancy and quick recovery.

Initial Block Download strategies: use parallelism. If you have multiple peers and decent bandwidth, you’ll download blocks in parallel, but CPU and IO can bottleneck. Consider tuning dbcache (increase to available memory minus overhead) to speed validation. Use fast SSDs—that IBD disk churn is brutal otherwise. Also, consider using snapshots or trusted bootstrap only if you have a way to verify them locally; otherwise full IBD is the only fully trust-minimized path.

Peer management: don’t blindly rely on default peer counts. I run 40–60 outbound/total peers depending on whether the node is behind NAT or Tor. Add static peers for reliability (useful for nodes in colocations or behind flaky consumer ISPs). Use blockfilterindex or txindex if you need compact wallet queries or third-party services; know they increase disk and memory needs. If you run over Tor, use -listen=1 and -proxy to route P2P through Tor, and consider -onlynet to limit connections to onion if you want stronger privacy.

Segregated duties: separate roles among nodes. One node can be the full archival validator and public-facing relay. Another can be a pruned, fast node that your wallet talks to locally for day-to-day use. This keeps the service-oriented node hardened and minimizes attack surface for the wallet. For my setups, a single archival node feeds a few pruned nodes behind NAT—works well and keeps sync times low.

Security practices: run the node as a limited user with least privilege. Keep your OS and bitcoin core up to date (back up your wallet and critical configs before upgrades!). Use filesystem snapshots or regular backups of the wallet. If you want remote management, set up SSH keys with proper firewall rules and avoid password logins. Seriously—don’t put RPC credentials in scripts with loose perms.

Wallets and privacy: run your own node and point wallets to it via RPC or Electrum-compatible interfaces if you’re comfortable. This reduces the need to trust third-party servers. But be aware: even connecting a wallet to your node leaks some information about your activity, depending on how the wallet queries. I prefer Privacy-focused wallets that do bloom-filter-free queries or use compact filters from my node with the blockfilterindex enabled.

Monitoring and maintenance: set up alerts for disk usage, high mempool size, or stalled IBD. Keep an eye on peers and bandwidth. Use logrotate for bitcoin logs if you keep verbose verbosity levels. Occasionally reindex or run -checkblocks if you suspect database corruption—better during scheduled maintenance windows because it’s CPU/IO heavy.

Tor and network ops: if you want to maximize censorship resistance and privacy, operate an onion service for your node. It’s not perfect, but it hides your IP and accepts inbound over Tor. Run a Tor hidden service with a long-lived key and consider binding your node to the .onion address as a stable contact point for other privacy-minded peers.

Performance tips and tuning: raise dbcache aggressively when reindexing or catching up; lower it for long-term background operation if you’re memory constrained. Tune txindex only if you need RPC calls like getrawtransaction for arbitrary txids; it’s expensive. Use –maxconnections and –maxuploadtarget to control resource usage; on metered upstreams, set sensible upload caps to avoid ISP issues.

Operational realities: nodes fail sometimes. Drives die. ISPs throttle. Build redundancy—multiple nodes, offsite backups of wallets, and clear recovery playbooks. If you depend on the node for production services, treat it like any critical infrastructure: monitoring, backups, automated provisioning, and an RTO objective. It’s a hobby for some, and infrastructure for others—plan accordingly.