Bitcoin Cache Machine is open-source software that allows you to create and manage one or more Bitcoin-focused privacy-preserving personal payment systems (perfect for long-term HODLers). BCM scripts allow you to quickly deploy a purely software-defined bitcoin payment stack to your local Ubuntu machine, or any Ubuntu-based SSH endpoint (e.g., SSH over LAN, SSH over Tor onion). BCM is built entirely with free and open-source software and is meant primarily for long-term Bitcoin HODLrs that want to run their own Bitcoin node infrastructure along with privacy-preserving technologies such as JoinMarket for on-chain UTXO management, and c-Lightning for access to Bitcoin's high-speed and low-free payment network, Lightning.

IMPORTANT! BCM is brand new and unstable, only use testnet coins! Builds will be formally tagged using GPG.asc once a stable proof-of-concept has been created. The master branch represents the most up-to-date stable, and tested, version of BCM. The 'dev' branch has the latest version of BCM.

BCM HAS NOT undergone formal security evaluation and should be considered for TESTING PURPOSES ONLY.

YOU ASSUME ALL RISK IN USING THIS SOFTWARE!!!

If you're involved with Bitcoin or care about your privacy, you will undoubtedly understand the importance of running your own fully-validating bitcoin node. Running a fully-validating node is easy enough--just download the software and run it on your home machine, but is that really enough to preserve your overall privacy? Did you configure it correctly? Are you also running a properly configured block explorer? Is your software up-to-date? Is your wallet software configured to consult your trusted full node (and ONLY your node)? Has TOR for these services been configured? Are you backing up user critical data in real time? In practice, there are ton of considerations that need to be addressed.

There are many areas where your privacy can be compromised if you're not careful. BCM is meant to handle many of these concerns by creating a software-defined data center at your home or office that's pre-configured to protect your overall privacy. If you can provide the necessary hardware (CPU, memory, disk), a LAN segment, and an internet gateway, BCM can do much of the rest. BCM dramatically lowers the barriers to deploying and operating your own bitcoin payment infrastructure.

For more information about the motivations behind Bitcoin Cache Machine, visit the public website.

Here are some of the development goals for Bitcoin Cache Machine:

• Provide a self-contained, distributed, event-driven, software-defined data center that focuses on operational Bitcoin and Lightning-related IT infrastructure.
• Enable small-to-medium-sized scalability by adding commodity x86_x64 hardware for home and small office settings.
• Integrate free and open source software (FOSS)!
• Create a composable framework for deploying Bitcoin and Lightning-related components, databases, visualizations, web-interfaces, etc., allowing app developers to start with a fully-operational baseline data center.
• Automate the deployment and operation (e.g., backups, updates, vulnerability assessments, key and password management, etc.) of BCM deployments.
• Require hardware wallets for cryptographic operations (PGP, SSH, and Bitcoin transactions).
• Configure all software to protect user's privacy (e.g., TOR for external communication, disk encryption, minimal attack surface, etc.).

You need an x86 machine capable of running a Debian-based Linux. This hardware should have two SSDs (formatted to BTRFS, min 500GB each) and mounted at /tier1. /tier1 storage holds the base OS (with KVM hypervisor), Type 1 VMs OSs and other software, and is where data meant for fast storage is kept, such as the bitcoin chainstate and Lightning-based software. The /tier2 storage is composed of a set of USB-based SPINNING disks, all configured in the same BTRFS pool. Things like bitcoin blocks and local backups are stored.

There exists two distinct roles in the BCM ecosystem. The Hardware Administrator and the Software Administrator. The Hardware Admin is responsible for powering hardware, adding and configuring storage (i.e., /tier1 storage composed of SSDs, and /tier2 storage for high-capacity, reliable, scalable commodity storage.). The Hardware administrator is responsible for providing compute, memory, and storage consumable by the Software Administrator. The software administrator exects the following:

1. Compute
2. Memory
3. Reliable Internet connectivity
4. Mesh network connectivity to local metro area (for redundnacy)
5. Storage 3a. /tier1 high speed dual-SSDs configured in BTRFS pool 3b. /tier2 high capacity spinning disks in BTRFS pool
6. SSH connection to base OS along with static IP.

The first step to getting started with Bitcoin Cache Machine get the BCM scripts (git repo) to your computer, a user-facing desktop or laptop running a Debian-based OS. The instructions below can be executed that will help you get started.

# download the BCM init script; VERIFY CONTENTS!
wget -o pull_bcm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BitcoinCacheMachine/BitcoinCacheMachine/dev/init_bcm.sh

# make the script executable then run it 
# scripts installs TOR, then git pulls the BCM source code from github 
# TODO 1) move from github to zeronet
chmod 0744 ./init_bcm.sh
sudo bash -c ./init_bcm.sh

The script above install the latest tor proxy, the pulls the BCM git clones the repo using TOR transport. Now that you have the code (in the bcm directory), you can decide how you want to deploy BCM. You can deploy it locally on bare-metal (best performance, good for single-user use) or in Type-1 VMs. Type 1 VMs are useful if you want to run multiple BCM instances on shared hardware (e.g., a full node for each family member). Finally, you can use BCM to deploy BCM server-side infrastructure to a remote SSH endpoint (or SSH exposed as an onion service).

After you have the BCM scripts, run the installer script. This installs necessary software as well as makes the bcm command available to the user's shell environment. Running just bcm will give you a help menu.

sudo bash -c ./install_bcm.sh

Next, decide how you want to run BCM:

. If you want to run BCM in Type-1 vms with hardware-enforced separation, use bcm deploy. Export BCM_VM_NAME to deploy more Type 1 VMs. If you want to run BCM directly on your localhost, run the deployment script bcm deploy --localhost. If you want to deploy BCM to a remote SSH endpoint, export BCM_SSH_HOSTNAME in your environment, and local bcm commands will be executed against the remote SSH host.

The best documentation can be found using the CLI --help menus. You can also consult the README.md files in the major directories of this repo. Consult CLI README for notes on how to use the BCM CLI.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for additional details of running BCM locally and contributing to the overall project.