Bitcoin Full Node on GCP Kubernetes Cluster

There are many reasons to run a Bitcoin full node. Running it in the cloud has a few extra benefits:

• A fully indexed Bitcoin full node can take up to 300Gi disk space and non-trivial amount of CPU and memory, which is quite a bit for an everyday laptop which is also used for other purposes.
• A cloud based Bitcoin full node can be accessed from anywhere through multiple devices, using standard tooling such as gcloud and kubectl.
• If you want to develop or test a Bitcoin application, it is easy to point local development environment to the Bitcoin full node through port forwarding and then smoothly deploy it to the cloud later.

Code contained this repository helps to run a Bitcoin full node in Google Cloud Platform using Kubernetes Engine. It can be used as a starting point to build and deploy Bitcoin powered applications.

Prerequisit

• Terraform (>0.13)
• Google Cloud SDK

Setup

1. If you have not setup GCP for your google account already, you can try to set it up here. For new users, Google offers 300 USD credits. To start the trial, Google requires registration of payment method. According to the terms and conditions for GCP free trial, mining cryptocurrency is not allowed, but running a full node is not mining.
2. After GCP is setup, you can find your billing account id here
3. Bitcoind RPC requires basic authentication. Use rpcauth.py to generate the rpcauth value, as shown below:

$ ./rpcauth.py username password
String to be appended to bitcoin.conf:
rpcauth=username:6436a49a71eabc219d79c38980be0a54$7bc37525a942213ee5ac1ae8cf7f802616b96bf2dd01a1e0121629be86c5d425

4. Go into terraform directory, run

terraform init
terraform plan -var 'project_id=YOUR_PROJECT_ID' \
               -var 'project_billing_account=YOUR_BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID_FROM_STEP_2' \
               -var 'bitcoin_rpcauth=YOUR_RPCAUTH_CREATED_FROM_STEP_3' \
               -out plan.out
               
## Confirm the output and then run
terraform apply "plan.out"

By default, machine type e2-standard-2 is used, you can change it to something else using kubernetes_node_pool_machine_type variable. Similiarly, project_name, region, zone and bitcoin_version can be configured as well through terraform variables.

If everything is executed successfully, a Bitcoin node should be running in the bitcoin namespace in the kubernetes cluster.

Usage

If you want to access the Bitcoin full node locally, you need to have simply run the following command:

kubectl port-forward svc/bitcoind 8332

Then you can interact with the bitcoind as if it is running locally on your machine

$ bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction e13d407be6085f1d0a0513f47577340f41f45d0b7250f3c554e8e05590113d7a true
  "txid": "e13d407be6085f1d0a0513f47577340f41f45d0b7250f3c554e8e05590113d7a",
  "hash": "7871c106d47a4d45784d427d990adc7e221aa6fade5d3c0bf39314812cea9ee6",
  "version": 1,
  "size": 371,
  "vsize": 206,
  "weight": 821,
  "locktime": 0,
  "vin": [
    {

  ....

Cost

Issues

If you see something like this after you run terraform apply

Error: googleapi: Error 403: Kubernetes Engine API is not enabled for this project. Please ensure it is enabled in Google Cloud Console and try again: visit https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/api/container.googleapis.com/overview?projec
t=YOUR_PROJECT_ID to do so., forbidden

You maybe need to run the following command to enable it.

gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com --project=YOUR_PROJECT_ID