Bitcoin Guides
Guides for running Bitcoin and Lightning on your own hardware with StartOS — from choosing a wallet to managing channels to migrating from another node platform.
Why Run Your Own Node?
When you use a Bitcoin wallet without your own node, you are trusting someone else’s server to tell you your balance, broadcast your transactions, and report on the state of the network. That server operator can see which addresses belong to you, track your transaction history, and potentially censor or delay your transactions.
Running your own Bitcoin node means your wallet talks directly to the Bitcoin network through your own verified copy of the blockchain. No one can see your addresses, censor your transactions, or lie to you about your balance. It is the difference between trusting and verifying.
StartOS makes this practical. Install a Bitcoin node from the StartOS Marketplace and it handles the configuration, networking, and storage — no command line required. Add an Electrum server (such as Fulcrum) and most wallets can connect to your node with a single address. Add LND or Core Lightning and you have a full Lightning node for instant, low-fee payments.
What’s in This Guide
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Archival vs Pruned Nodes — The trade-offs between archival and pruned nodes, and how StartOS makes pruned nodes work seamlessly with multiple downstream services.
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Electrum Servers — What an Electrum server is, why most wallets need one, and whether you can do without.
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Connecting a Wallet — The steps every wallet has in common: getting the address, why every connection is SSL, and how to make your wallet trust your server’s certificate.
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Bitcoin Wallets — On-chain wallets that connect to your own Bitcoin node or Electrum server, with the platforms each supports and where its connection settings live.
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Lightning Wallets — How LND and Core Lightning hand a wallet its connection, and the apps and dashboards that take it — Zeus, BitBanana, RTL, LNbits, Alby Hub, and more.
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Migrating LND to StartOS — How to transfer your LND node from Umbrel, myNode, or another StartOS server without closing channels.
Supported Implementations
StartOS supports multiple Bitcoin and Lightning node implementations. You are not locked into a single stack — choose the implementation that fits your needs.
Bitcoin Nodes
The Bitcoin service on StartOS is available in multiple flavors (implementations). The service is called Bitcoin regardless of which flavor you install — the flavor determines the underlying software.
| Flavor | Registry | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin Core | Start9 Registry | The reference implementation — validates blocks, relays transactions, serves wallet data via RPC |
| Bitcoin Knots (pre-RDTS) | Community Registry | A Bitcoin Core derivative with additional configuration options and policy controls, pinned to its last release before the RDTS softfork |
Both follow the same blockchain and expose the same RPC interface used by wallets and Electrum servers, so switching between them keeps the chain you have already synced. Both registries ship with StartOS — click “Switch” beneath the current registry title in the Marketplace sidebar to move between them. Community Registry services are not maintained, recommended, or supported by Start9.
Lightning Nodes
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| LND | Lightning Labs’ implementation — the most widely supported by wallets and management tools |
| Core Lightning | Blockstream’s implementation — includes the CLN Application web dashboard |
Learn More
- StartOS Documentation — Installing StartOS, user manual, networking, backups
- Contact Support — Get help from the Start9 team