Harris Brakmić - Bitcoin and Lightning Network on Raspberry Pi: Running Nodes on Pi3, Pi4 and Pi Zero

Harris Brakmi

Bitcoin and Lightning Network on Raspberry Pi

Running Nodes on Pi3, Pi4 and Pi Zero

Harris Brakmi

Troisdorf, Germany

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5521-6 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

ISBN 978-1-4842-5521-6 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-5522-3

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5522-3

Apress standard

Harris Brakmi 2019

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For my wife and our daughters.

Table of Contents

Part I: Enter Bitcoin

Part II: Using Bitcoin

Part III: Using Lightning Network

About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer

About the Author

Harris Brakmi

is a senior software engineer from Germany. He has experience working with C#, Java, JavaScript, Angular, React, and NodeJS. Occasionally he has worked on projects targeting Android and iOS platforms. He discovered Bitcoin a few years ago, but decided to approach it differently. While most people working in the cryptocurrency space were looking for quick gains, Harris ignored the whole monetary component and concentrated on learning Ethereums programming language. Ethereum itself is an alternative blockchain implementation that unlike Bitcoin script offers a turing-complete programming language, Solidity. Gaining a solid understanding of the programming behind cryptocurrency in general, he returned to Bitcoin to see what he could do with the worlds most popular cryptocurrency.

About the Technical Reviewer

Sai Yamanoor

is an embedded systems engineer working for an industrial gases company in Buffalo, NY. His interests, deeply rooted in DIY and Open Source Hardware, include developing gadgets that aid behavior modification. He has published two books with his brother, and in his spare time, he likes to contribute to build things that improve quality of life. You can find his project portfolio at http://saiyamanoor.com

There are four major factors that make up Bitcoinmoney, decentralized network, Proof-of-Work, and time. Well explore each in this chapter to understand the basics of what were going to be working with.

Bitcoin is money . In my humble opinion, this is the simplest and, at the same time, most precise definition of Bitcoin. Of course, there is much more beneath it as Bitcoins fundaments reach very deep into many different areas of science. There is cryptography, information science, computer science, probability, logic, economy, game theory, just to name a few. However, in the end were still looking at Bitcoin as money. In this book we will learn about Bitcoin mostly from its technological perspective by building concrete examples with Raspberry Pi 3, Pi 4, and Pi Zero, but nevertheless, we will also touch a few bits of its history and theory that underpin it.

At the very beginning, Bitcoin might appear as very complex, hard to grasp, maybe even a chaotic system, thats seemingly trying to reinvent the wheel. In the end, we not only have money but too much of it, actually.

There are hundreds of different monies out there. And most of them are digital as well. These days were more and more using credit cards or online payment systems like PayPal than the old-fashioned paper cash. And even companies are now trying to establish their own cash, like Facebook with its Libra currency. The road toward a cashless society is nothing exceptional anymore but merely a question of time. Therefore, a legitimate question would be: Why do we need Bitcoin at all?

could be considered money. In fact, throughout history human cultures have developed and used various media for these purposes, But all these different monies have one thing in common: theyre scarce. This is what makes them valuable and generally acceptable as money.

The fact that one cant that easily create new money out of thin air assigns each coin its value. The scarcity can be achieved by different means, for example, the fact that gold is rare, because there is only so much of it within Earths crust, or that its exceptionally hard to create giant stones from Yap. We can say that the harder it gets to produce something, its value would be higher. Our modern paper cash too is very hard to produce. Just try to count all the counterfeit symbols on a single note. Bitcoin in this case is no different, as there will be only 21,000,000 of bitcoins in existence. The single unit,