This is an opinion editorial by Anthony Feliciano, a bitcoin event organizer and bitcoin magazine Contributor.
A few years ago, I had a problem when my power went out in my apartment, and my Raspiblitz went offline. It was the start of a new project, i.e., “How do I prevent this from happening again?” I won’t go into the technical setup in this article, as I wrote an article with in-depth instructions on how you can try it out for yourself.
It lets you #reckless with a lightning node text. I mean, what are we doing if we call ourselves bitcoiners and don’t become #reckless with tools, applications, and hardware? Base here, I was being sent to California for work. Now, if you run an LN node at home, you experience power outages, internet outages, hardware freeze-ups, and anything else you encounter while maintaining the node – but you’re at home, so You know how to fix everything and get back to normal with minimal downtime. What if you are on the road for an extended period of time and this happens? Hopefully you have someone at home who can fix this for you or at least guide them. If you don’t, are you going to leave your node offline for “x” number of days? I mean I think it’s being kind of #reckless. What did I do, you ask? Why, I took it with me on the road. The term mobile banking has been in use for a few decades due to the development of the protocols, infrastructure and hardware that make this possible. So I thought, what if I can make my Raspiblitz node appear as Mobile Banking 2.0?
# be careless now
I drove 1,000 miles from Denver, Colorado to El Segundo, Calif.
I packed up the family, grabbed my LN node and we were on the road. Here is a picture as we left. My car was filled with family, kids, dogs and my nod. I needed to find a nice enough spot where it wouldn’t be tinkered with too much. I kept it under the seat the whole time – a good test to see how long the battery will last on this unit. I had never fully tested battery life before.
This next photo is somewhere in Utah. I don’t remember where, but it was noon and it was lunch time. My battery was still alive and the node was synced. I know I’ve lost connection through parts of the Rocky Mountains, but the node synced after the cellular connection was re-established.
The second picture 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 didn’t need to be shown multiple times.
Our next stop will be Las Vegas for the night. Shortly after leaving Utah and arriving in Las Vegas the battery ran out 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 battery life to be around eight hours. I didn’t keep a full-time check on it, but it represented a good part of the first leg of the journey. Once we got to Las Vegas I recharged the battery backup and synced again. Once I got enough charge I took it out for another picture.
It was the night of the 2022 NFL Draft in Las Vegas.
“Jacksonville Jaguars Selected, Raspiblitz, With First Pick of the 2022 NFL Draft!” *The crowd becomes uncontrollable!*
The next day we left for California. The battery pack kept the node powered throughout the hotel, about five hours for us. While California was our home for a week, I didn’t take Nod with me while I was on the road. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I left it at the hotel. As you can guess the node will sync only when it gets my cell phone hotspot connection. So, on the days I didn’t take it with me, I turned it off at the hotel and when I came back, turned it back on and synced again.
Could I try to configure node to connect to hotel wifi? Maybe, if I edited the wifi file. I would need a screen to see the IP address assigned to connect. This is a downside of going headless (without a screen) without a connection to your own devices.
This was followed by a photo op at the Surfside Brewery. As you can see I have it chilling with me at the bar. Absolutely #useless. I understood. A few days later it will be the same place I held one of my CryptoBirkings events that I normally do in Denver – but why not take everything mobile, and get the word out of bitcoin through events like these. To a completely different state and a bunch of new bitcoiners I meet together?
The week ended and we had to make the return journey, which was similar to a two-day trip. This was the last photo I took of the hotel in St. George, Utah.
To sum it up – it was a successful #reckless road trip. We drove over 2200 miles with two kids, two Siberian Huskies and my LN node. Through this my entire node survived the venture there and back. I bet a lot of people went on full cringe mode just by looking at the photos and reading the stories. I understood. That was the gist of this journey and article. I wanted to document the #reckless journey showing off the potential of bitcoin so others don’t have to. I wanted to show all the tools that the awesome bitcoin developers have spent years working on are actually being implemented in real-world use cases. We as a community have grown beyond bitcoin twitter to be able to apply these tools to real-world situations and make excuses to #reckless and succeed! This is a testament to this community.
That being said, my setup was not perfect. I’m sure there are better cases or products out there that would have made the whole setup better. Yes – but that’s what I had 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. In case you were wondering, I used the Zeus app as my mobile phone app. I was able to connect to my node through a tor address. I also tested payments from it in the days leading up to the CryptoBirkings event at Surfside Brewery.
I hope you’re “wow-wow” and/or inspired to come up with some fun ways to be #reckless. So, is this Mobile Banking 2.0? bitcoin mobile banking Eh, we’ll work on the terminology later. enjoy friends. #Careless.
This is a guest post by Anthony Feliciano. The opinions expressed are solely their own and do not necessarily represent those of BTC Inc. or . reflect the thoughts of bitcoin magazine,
