so in this post, im gonna try to explain how to start mining with your own bitcoin node, and start signalling for bip110, using an old laptop or pc.

this is gonna be heavyly opionated and im gonna try to keep this short and brief. but at the end im gonna give some bonus tips.

at any point if you get confused, you can ask your favorite llm for help by copy pasting this post and telling it where you got stuck. but also feel free to ask help from me under the replies.

first thing we need is a bitcoin node. you can install it from https://bitcoinknots.org. based on your os there can be multiple options there, again you can ask an llm for help if you are stuck, and also feel free to ask me for help as well. for this guide we are gonna use the gui version. so if you are on macos download the (App) variant. and on linux after downloading the bin files use the bitcoin-qt.

once we open the client for the first time, you will get an overlay for the initial block download, before letting it continue, click on Settings > Options and disable “Prune block storage” because we need a full node. after doing that say “Ok” and save the changes, and then restart the node, by clicking on File > Exit and then starting the node again. after doing this we will just let it download the chain to the tip.

after initial block download is done, we will have a working bitcoin node but its really barebone, to make this node useful we will need several things such as mempoolspace, electrum, datum, core lightning… instead of downloading and intalling these one by one, making sure everything connecting to each other correctly. we are just gonna use a “compose file”. a compose file is basically lets you setup and configure multiple things at one command.

for this step you will need to have docker or podman installed on your system. i personally use podman. the compose file is here: https://github.com/DeepDoge/bitcoin-kit in the link a explained how to use it and set it up step by step.

once you have it ready and running, you will have a mempoolspace web interface for your own node, will have an electrum server (including the tls variant at port 50002), core lightning, and datum. all ready to use.

your datum gateway should be running stratum at port 23334, you can connect your miner on the same network to it like this: 192.168.x.x:23334 and it should work.

so the next step is exposing this port to the internet using tunnels. for this we are gonna use https://localtonet.com. after you create a localtonet account, all you have to do is going to the My Tunnels > TPC - UDP > Create TPC - UDP Tunnel in the openned dropdown select TPC as protocol type, and enter your port which is 23334.

after creating the tunnel, make sure exposed server also have the same port. on the tunnel item on the list, click on the gears icon, on click on “Change” on the “Server Port” and also make it 23334 as well.

now you can use the random subdomain address localtonet gave you for mining which should look like this: random123.localtonet.com:23334

so now we have a bitcoin node running, we have datum gateway running, we exposed the datums stratum port using localtonet. now all we have to do is rent some hashrate from the braiins hashpower and start