Twitter’s founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has launched his own Bitcoin Node (BTC). On January 5th, the tech billionaire posted a screenshot of the Bitcoin node software Bitcoind running on his computer. Dorsey is now helping with the validation of Bitcoin transactions.
Dorsey published the screenshot together with the words “Running #bitcoin”. The photo shows Dorsey’s computer synchronizing with the Bitcoin blockchain, which requires a user to download the entire history of the chain so far. The Bitcoin blockchain is around 325GB at the time of writing.
Running #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/W51ga3yrKb
– jack (@jack) February 5, 2021
The syncing process can take weeks depending on your computer and internet speeds. Dorsey’s screenshot shows that he has only synced 2% of the chain so far.
When asked if he’d run the node on a dedicated Raspberry Pi, Dorsey revealed that he had set it up with an M1 Macbook chip – Apple’s newest laptop processor. Dorsey tweeted, “Assuming a scratch build on M1 first.”
Bitcoin nodes differ from Bitcoin miners in that they do not compete for any part of the block rewards. Rather, each node hosts another immutable copy of the blockchain, increasing overall network security. The number of full Bitcoin nodes in operation has fluctuated recently, landing between 7,000 and 11,000 according to recent data.
The number of Bitcoin nodes recently rose to an all-time high. As reported by Cointelegraph, 11,613 Bitcoin nodes were up and running on Jan. 20. That number had dropped to 7,260 at the time of writing.
