This is an op-ed by Anthony Feliciano, Bitcoin event organizer and Bitcoin Magazine taxpayer.
A couple of years ago, I had a problem when the power went out in my apartment and my RaspiBlitz got disconnected. It was the start of a new project, that is, “how do I prevent this from happening again?” I won’t go into technical setup in this article, as I’ve wrote an article with detailed instructions on how you can try this out for yourself.
This is more fun, let’s be #reckless with a Lightning Node article. I mean, if we’re going to call ourselves Bitcoiners and not get #reckless with tools, apps, and hardware, what are we doing? The premise here, I was sent to California for work. Now, if you run an LN node at home, experience power outages, internet outages, hardware crashes, and anything else you might encounter while maintaining a node, but you’re home, so you know how to fix everything and get back to normal. with minimal downtime. What if you’re on the road for an extended period of time and that happens? I hope you have someone at home who can fix it or at least guide you. If you don’t, will it take your node offline for “x” days? I mean, I guess that’s being #reckless in a way. What did I do, you ask? Of course, I took it on the road with me, of course. The term mobile banking it has been used for a couple of decades due to the development of protocols, infrastructure and hardware that make it possible. So I thought, what if I could display my Raspiblitz node as mobile banking 2.0?
Now let’s get #reckless
I drove over 1,000 miles from Denver, Colorado to El Segundo, California.
I packed up the family, grabbed my LN node and we hit the road. Here is a photo of how we left. My car was loaded with family, kids, dogs, and my node. He needed to find a good enough place, where he wouldn’t be mistreated too much. I pretty much kept it under the seat the entire time, a good test to see how long the battery will last in this unit. I’ve never fully tested battery life before.
The next photo is somewhere in Utah. I don’t remember where, but it was noon and time for lunch. My battery was still alive and the node was in sync. I know I lost connection in parts of the Rocky Mountains, but the node synced up once the cellular connection was restored.
The other photo I show is the RaspiBlitz menu screen, showing that my node is connected and synced. **Note** I only took one photo of the menu as it was not necessary to show it multiple times.
Our next stop would be Las Vegas for the night. Some time after we left Utah and arrived in Las Vegas, the battery finally died and my node went offline. I got a little #reckless because I was driving and forgot to check the battery and let it die. I estimate the battery life to be around eight hours. I didn’t control it full time, but it served a good part of the first leg of the trip. Once we got to Vegas, I recharged the backup battery and resynchronized. Once I had a good enough charge, I took it out for another photo.
It turned out to be the night of the 2022 NFL draft in Las Vegas.
“With the first pick in the 2022 NFL Draft, the Jacksonville Jaguars select RaspiBlitz!” *The crowd goes crazy!*
The next day we left for California. The battery pack kept the node powered all the way to the hotel, about five hours for us. Although California was our home for a week, I did not take the node with me while traveling. Sometimes she did and sometimes she left him at the hotel. As you can guess, the node will only sync when it receives the hotspot connection from my cell phone. So the days I didn’t take it with me, I turned it off at the hotel and when I got back, I turned it back on and resynchronized.
Could I have tried to configure the node to connect to the hotel WiFi? Possibly, if I edited the WiFi. I would have needed a screen to see the IP address assigned to connect. That’s one downside of being headless (without a screen) without a connection to your own devices.
Next was a photo shoot at Surfside Brewery. As you can see I have him fucking at the bar with me. Yes, totally #reckless. I get it. This would be the same place a couple days later where I held one of my Cryptobeerkings events that I normally do in Denver, but why not go all mobile and spread the word of Bitcoin through events like these, in a state totally different and with a lot of new Bitcoiners that I got to meet?
The week came to an end and we had to make the return trip, which was a fairly similar two-day trip. This was the last photo I took from the hotel in St. George, Utah.
To conclude, it was a successful #reckless road trip. We did over 2,200 miles with two kids, two Siberian Huskies and my LN node. Regardless, my node survived the round trip adventure. I bet a lot of people who saw the photos and read the stories went into cringe mode. I get it. That was the point of this trip and article. I wanted to document the journey of being #reckless while still showing off Bitcoin skills, so others don’t have to. I wanted to show all the tools that amazing Bitcoin developers have been working on for years, and that are actually applied in real world use cases. We as a community have gone from Bitcoin Twitter, users who can’t code or develop, to being able to apply these tools in real world situations and make excuses to be #reckless and succeed. This is a testimony of this community.
That said, my setup wasn’t perfect. I’m sure there are better cases or products that would have improved the whole setup. Yes, but this is what I had at my disposal at the time. Maybe some hardware and/or developers will read this and come up with a better solution, which I really hope someone does as it only benefits us as a community. If you were wondering, I used the zeus app like my mobile phone app. I was able to connect to my node through a Tor address. I even tried payouts in the days leading up to the Cryptobeerkings event at Surfside Brewery.
I hope you’re “shocked” and/or inspired to come up with some fun ways to get #reckless. So is this mobile banking 2.0? Bitcoin mobile banking? Hey, we’ll work on the terminology later. Enjoy friends. #Reckless.
This is a guest post by Anthony Feliciano. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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