Location: Remotely Date: Saturday 6th March Company: Block Digest Role: Host

The core fundamental aspect of Bitcoin is its censorship-resistant nature; this is only possible because the network is meaningfully decentralised. 

Bitcoiners achieve decentralisation across the world, running nodes. These nodes maintain the network rules, known as consensus, and ensure all transactions and blocks are valid by keeping a copy of the entire history of the blockchain. 

Following my previous interview with Shinobi, I went away and attempted to set up three things:

• Tor - a distributed network that preserves my privacy by hiding the location of my node and preventing eavesdropping
• Bitcoin Core - the most popular bitcoin node software
• Specter - software that connects to your Bitcoin node and allows you to create a local wallet or connect to a hardware wallet

In this interview, Shinobi helps me set up Tor, Bitcoin Core and Specter, and we discuss the difficulties for non-technical people, UX and why running a node is essential.