Twitter boss Jack Dorsey is now personally a part of the Bitcoin blockchain network (BTC). As @jack announced on February 5th on his social network, he now operates his own “full node”, which means that he is now involved in the validation of Bitcoin transactions with one of his private computers.
As evidence, Dorsey attached one to his tweet Screenshot on which he commented with the words “Running #bitcoin”. The picture shows how his computer synchronizes with the Bitcoin blockchain. In order to set up a “complete node”, the entire previous data record of the Bitcoin blockchain must first be downloaded, which is currently 325GB amounts to.
Running #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/W51ga3yrKb
– jack (@jack) February 5, 2021
The synchronization can therefore take several weeks, depending on the computing power and Internet speed. So the prominent entrepreneur has a certain waiting time ahead of him, because so far this process is only 2% complete.
When asked by a Twitter user whether he is using a dedicated Raspberry Pi to operate his “node”, answered Dorsey that he uses a separate Macbook with an M1 processor for this. This chipset from Apple is particularly suitable for operating Bitcoin nodes, but some node operators consider the Raspberry Pi to be even better.
Node operators are not to be confused with Bitcoin miners, because they are not involved in the immediate “creation” of new blocks, but rather act as a kind of image of the blockchain, which helps validate transactions and improves the security of the network. The number of “full nodes” fluctuated strongly recently and is currently between 7,000 and 11,000 nodes estimated.
The number of nodes on January 20th had a new one Record high of 11,613 units, whereupon that number has dropped to 7,260 units by the time we went to press.
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