SV Node

The following instructions describe installing Bitcoin SV Node using tools available in most mainstream Linux distributions. The assumption has been made that you are using a Bourne-like shell such as bash.

To start the install of Bitcoin, make sure you use an account that can use su or sudo to install software into directories owned by the root user.

Download the zipped release of your choosing, for this example we are using 1.0.16 which is the latest release at the time of writing:

wget https://download.bitcoinsv.io/bitcoinsv/1.1.0/bitcoin-sv-1.1.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Confirm downloaded file sha hash matches those provided at download.bitcoinsv.io for the version you have downloaded.

sha256sum bitcoin-sv-1.1.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
# Expected Output 
# ec0470ee43224be4f1fe9315b96a72c14efdccac82416263916f3c1576719ad3  bitcoin-sv-1.1.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Locate the file you downloaded and extract it using the tar command followed by the argument xzf followed by the file name. The argument xzf means eXtract the gZipped tar archive file. For example, for a 64-bit tar archive in your current directory, the command is:

tar xvf bitcoin-sv-1.1.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

Create a symbolic link from a new directory called bitcoin to the bitcoin-sv-1.0.16 directory you just made by unzipping for easier use and updates:

ln -s bitcoin-sv-1.1.0 bitcoin

Create a bitcoin-data directory to put bitcoin data in (or else Bitcoin will put data in ~/.bitcoin by default):

mkdir bitcoin-data

Data folder considerations

The bitcoin-data folder will contain the logs, blocks, UTXO set and various other files the SV Node needs to function. For mainnet this folder will get very big, around 350GB for the UTXO set and 12TB for the blocks as of January 2024. The UTXO set store in bitcoin-data/chainstate is used for lookups to validate transactions and should be stored on a high-performant SSD. Depending on your use case, the bitcoin-data/blocks folder can be stored on slower, cheaper HDD storage.

If setting up the node in AWS, see AWS Volumes Setupfor more details on a recommended setup.

Config

Create a bitcoin.conf file in the directory to configure the settings to run your node using:

cd bitcoin-data/
vim bitcoin.conf

A detailed list of available options can be found in Configuration. Below is an example bitcoin.conf file used by a node on the mainnet:

# start in background
daemon=1

# Select network -- comment out all for mainnet
#testnet=1
#stn=1
#regtest=1

# Maintain at most <n> connections to peers
maxconnections=20
# Maximum number of inbound connections from a single address.
# Not applicable to whitelisted peers.
maxconnectionsfromaddr=1

# Ports - Leave commented for defaults
#port=8333
#rpcport=8332

# Accept command line and JSON-RPC commands
server=1
rpcworkqueue=600
rpcthreads=16
#rpcallowip=0.0.0.0/0 
rpcuser=CHANGE_ME
rpcpassword=CHANGE_ME

# Required Consensus Rules for Genesis
excessiveblocksize=10GB
maxstackmemoryusageconsensus=100MB

# Mempool usage allowance
maxmempool=8GB

# Maintain a full transaction index, used by the getrawtransaction rpc call
txindex=1

# Cache options
dbcache=8GB
maxsigcachesize=256
maxscriptcachesize=256

# TX options
# Minimum mining transaction fee, 1 sat / kb
minminingtxfee=0.00000001
# Max number and size of related Child and Parent transactions per block template 
#limitancestorcount=100
#limitdescendantcount=100
#limitancestorsize=25000000
#limitdescendantsize=25000000

# ZeroMQ notification options
#zmqpubhashtx=tcp://127.0.0.1:28332
#zmqpubhashblock=tcp://127.0.0.1:28332

# Debug options
# can be: net, tor, mempool, http, bench, zmq, db, rpc, addrman, selectcoins,
#       reindex, cmpctblock, rand, prune, proxy, mempoolrej, libevent,
#       coindb, leveldb, txnprop, txnsrc, journal, txnval.
# 1 = all options enabled.
# 0 = all off (default)
#debug=1

# debugexclude to ignore set log items, can be used to keep log file a bit cleaner
debugexclude=libevent
debugexclude=leveldb
debugexclude=zmq
debugexclude=txnsrc
debugexclude=net

# Setting to 1 prevents bitcoind from clearning the log file on restart. 0/off is default
#shrinkdebugfile=0 

# Stores the block data in files of 2GB on disk
# the default of 128MB will result in lots of small files
preferredblockfilesize=2GB

# Mining, biggest block size you want to mine
blockmaxsize=4GB 
# When mining, consider switching to a pruned node
# Using prune is incompatible with txindex
#prune=100000 # Keep only last ~100GB of blocks
#txindex=0

# Non-mining businesses that do not want to run the Alert System can enable
# the following settings to remain in sync with any validly processed
# DAR Alert Messages.
#enableassumewhitelistedblockdepth=1
#assumewhitelistedblockdepth=6

# Prevent possible memory exhaustion attacks
maxpendingresponses_getheaders=50
maxpendingresponses_gethdrsen=10

# Tunings options
#threadsperblock=32
#maxparallelblocks=4
#scriptvalidatormaxbatchsize=128
#maxparallelblocksperpeer=3
#maxstdtxvalidationduration=500
#maxstdtxnsperthreadratio=1000
#maxnonstdtxvalidationduration

Systemd

To run Bitcoind, pass in the location of the configuration file as well as the location of where to store the bitcoin data:

# Example based on user
/home/user/bitcoin/bin/bitcoind \
-conf=/home/user/bitcoin-data/bitcoin.conf \
-datadir=/home/user/bitcoin-data -daemon

Create the bitcoind.service file:

sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/bitcoind.service

[Unit]
Description=Bitcoin service
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
# Make sure to replace username
ExecStart=/home/user/bitcoin/bin/bitcoind -conf=/home/user/bitcoin-data/bitcoin.conf -datadir=/home/user/bitcoin-data -daemon
ExecStop=/home/user/bitcoin/bin/bitcoin-cli -conf=/home/user/bitcoin-data/bitcoin.conf -datadir=/home/user/bitcoin-data stop
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID
Restart=on-abnormal
TimeoutStopSec=300
PrivateTmp=true
LimitNOFILE=65536
# Make sure to replace username
User=user
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then start:

sudo systemctl start bitcoind.service
sudo systemctl enable bitcoind.service

The SV Node will now start and you can monitor progress in the log file. It will take several days for a fresh sync of the entire chain as of January 2024.

tail -f bitcoin-data/bitcoind.log