With this you mean a relay node without blockchain, right? (sorry for my noobness)
It's fine, yes. I mean a relay without a blockchain at all. I think I misread your post as saying you had 1GB storage, but I'm guessing now that you have 1GB ram.That's right, I was not clear about that. I have 1GB DDR3 Ram and everything else is running from a 8GB micro SD card, although 1,5 GB is used.
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Soon-ish (probably in 0.11) we'll support running pruned nodes which could fully verify things but won't need the whole blockchain. They'll still require a couple gigs of storage and that amount will grow (but much slower, unless things that spam the utxo set become popular)... which might fit better on a small device like that, though it would be useful it wouldn't be as useful as something with the whole history.
Sounds great!
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So I can better attach a USB HDD and run a full node.
That you could do. Though right now you'll need, say, 60 gigs of storage though better if you have more since you'd be able to keep serving old blocks long into the future. (Actual usage is more like 32GB at the moment, but since it can grow at a rate of about 25-50GB/yr, it's best to have plenty of headroom if you're going to store a full chain.Quote
USB flash sticks often wear out quickly when there are many writes, so you'd want an actual SSD or spinning hard drive. On newegg it looks like one can get a 500GB usb external drive for under $50.
I'm aware of the wear. I might hook up some old hardware I have laying around but I rather keep this device low profile without all the extras.
After receiving some exorbitant donations for my TOR node (oniontip) I might upgrade to a high end server.
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Are full nodes still useful for the network? Also when running on a low end machine (but 15Mbps bandwidth)?
I only want to run the node when it's really useful, otherwise it doesn't make sense.
Absolutely. One thing that would be pretty useful is to run a hidden service bitcoin node, we're rather short on HS nodes and you can use tor to limit the bandwidth. ("BandwidthRate" in torrc). The maximum long term average data rate for the blockchain is about 14kbit/sec. So even just a few megabits can do a lot to help keep more peers connected.I only want to run the node when it's really useful, otherwise it doesn't make sense.
I was already looking into that, but was in doubt what was better.
Does the "normal" bitcoin network also use the hidden network? Or are they seperate.
Well, since they both need the same blockchain, they probably work together, right? Otherwise you would end up with two different coins. So at certain places the hidden network connects to the normal network.
If this is true I'm definitely going to run a hidden service and not a normal service when I upgrade to better hardware or when an MK802 is good enough for 0.11.
Thanks for the detailed answers.
