Backstory

Hey, I'm Stadicus. I wrote the first version of this guide back in 2017, when Lightning was still pretty obscure, the mainnet wasn't even live yet, and running a node meant stringing together a hundred half-documented commands you hoped someone on Reddit had gotten right. I love to tinker and build things, so I wrote down what worked, put it on Medium, and moved it to GitHub when it outgrew a single blog post.

It hasn't been "my own" guide for a long time. Dozens of contributors have shaped it over the years. RaspiBolt is a community project now, and the community keeps it honest.

Why Bitcoin? Why a node?

Bitcoin is doing something quietly revolutionary: it lets you hold money that nobody else can freeze, inflate, or quietly reassign. That only works if the network stays decentralised, if enough of us run our own full nodes to enforce the rules rather than trusting somebody else to tell us what the rules are.

A full node is, in plain terms, your own personal goldsmith. When a payment arrives, your node verifies it from first principles: the signatures, the scripts, the history, the supply cap. No trust, no middleman, no API key away from being cut off. If Bitcoin is digital gold, a full node is the set of scales you own and trust.

That kind of independence shouldn't be reserved for people with a rack in a datacentre. A Raspberry Pi in the corner of your office, quietly validating every block that's ever been mined, is a delightfully democratic piece of infrastructure.

Why Lightning?

Bitcoin's base layer is deliberately slow and deliberately expensive. That's a feature, not a bug, a genuinely decentralised blockchain is a scarce resource, and it cannot scale to every coffee purchase on the planet without breaking exactly the property that makes it valuable.

This is why the Lightning Network exists. It's a second layer built on top of Bitcoin that settles small payments instantly, routes them between strangers via a mesh of payment channels, and falls back to the base chain only when it has to. It sounds almost too good to be true. The technology is solid, well-researched, and stays faithful to the open-source, cypherpunk roots of Bitcoin itself.

Running your own Lightning node means you're not just a spectator, you're part of the network that makes instant, low-fee Bitcoin payments possible.

Why RaspiBolt?

Through many iterations, I've arrived at a setup I think is worth sharing. It's opinionated, I picked the tools that are reliable, well-maintained, and possible to reason about. I'm not a systems specialist, so if you spot improvements, please say so. The GitHub issues list is where the guide gets better.

The good old days

The original goal of the RaspiBolt guide, back in 2017, was simply buying a Blockaccino. I used the Eclair Lightning implementation on testnet, because mainnet wasn't running yet. Oh, how time flies.

A community project

Thanks to every contributor who has filed an issue, opened a pull request, tested a fix on their own Pi, or helped a newcomer in the Telegram group. Thanks to everyone who cares about Bitcoin enough to run their own node, and to understand what it's actually doing.

The top 20 contributors on GitHub, by commit count:

Full list on github.com/raspibolt/raspibolt/graphs/contributors.

This guide is for you.

Curious how the pieces fit together before you start? See Architecture for the 10,000-foot view.