Trustedcoin

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The trustedcoin plugin

A plugin that uses block explorers (blockstream.info, mempool.space, mempool.emzy.de, blockchair.com, blockchain.info -- suggest others) as backends instead of your own Bitcoin node.

This isn't what you should be doing, but sometimes you may need it.

(Remember this will download all blocks CLN needs from one of these providers.)

How to install

This is distributed as a single binary for your delight (or you can compile it yourself with go get, or ask me for binaries for other systems if you need them).

Download it, call chmod +x <binary> and put it in ~/.lightning/plugins (create that directory if it doesn't exist).

You only need the binary you can get in the releases page, nothing else.

Then add the following line to your ~/.lightning/config file:

disable-plugin=bcli

This disables the default Bitcoin backend plugin so trustedcoin can take its place.

If you're running on testnet, signet or liquid trustedcoin will also work automatically.

Using bitcoind

If you have bitcoind available and start lightningd with the settings bitcoin-rpcuser, bitcoin-rpcpassword, and optionally bitcoin-rpcconnect (defaults to 127.0.0.1) and bitcoin-rpcport (defaults to 8332 on mainnet etc.), then trustedcoin will try to use that and fall back to the explorers when it is not available -- so now you can have a node running at home and it will not be the end of the world for your CLN node when there is a power outage.

Extra: how to bootstrap a Lightning node from scratch, without Bitcoin Core, on Ubuntu amd64

add-apt-repository ppa:lightningnetwork/ppa
apt update
apt install lightningd
mkdir -p ~/.lightning/plugins
echo 'disable-plugin=bcli' >> .lightning/config
cd ~/.lightning/plugins
wget https://github.com/nbd-wtf/trustedcoin/releases/download/v0.8.6/trustedcoin-v0.8.6-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvf trustedcoin-v0.8.6-linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd
lightningd