Over the last few days I have been trying to spin up a local BCH full node to play around and see if I can experiment with building some simple web apps. I came to this sub and clicked all the sidebar links for the different node implementations and checked out each one. I started with Bitcoin Unlimited because that was what someone had recommended to me. I found it was pretty straightforward to install and get running, and it took about a day and a half to download the whole blockchain. I have a fairly beefy computer and 300Mbps internet so during most of the synchronization there was no bottleneck that I could find so I'm not sure why it took even that long. My CPU never went above 20% utilization and network activity was mostly idle during the latter portion of the download.
Once the sync completed, I checked out the GUI options, but found the interface pretty bare. I wanted to view live information about the network and do all the things people say you need a full node to do, like watch live verification of each new block and explore the blockchain locally in real time. I realized I needed to look into CLI options at this point but I couldn't find any good guides for getting started for someone who is a command line novice. I consider myself more tech savvy than most people and run linux on my devices but I have never been an actual developer so that world is still new to me. It seemed most of the documentation was oriented toward developers rather than consumer-level users. I decided to check out some other implementations.
Bitcoin ABC was next. Same thing. It was trickier to get working because the website links were confusing as to which files to download. I think I finally got it working through the ppa but once it was running I had a hard time finding good user documentation that was understandable to someone who had never run a node before.
Finally after checking out the other implementations I decided Bcoin was what I wanted since I didn't want to deal with the command line and want to practice running nodes for business operations. So far I've tried following a couple of guides for Bcoin but keep getting errors on installation and can't find answers online so I haven't gotten it to work yet. If someone here could help me out I'd really appreciate it.
On a side note, is this really what Core expects people to go through just to USE Bitcoin??? I've been a BTC/BCH user for a couple years now and never had an issue with SPV. That is the primary end user experience and it should aim toward making it as simple as possible to send/receive transactions. Node operation should stay in the realm of enthusiasts, but documentation could still be better on this front.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8ygluj/is_it_just_me_or_is_running_a_full_node_still/
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