btcglobe.live

Watch. Run. Mine.

Bitcoin at whatever depth you like. No account, no company. Two home nodes, a little miner, and you.

right now — peers · — countries · — over Tor · ⛏️ — TH/s humming

How this started

It started with a lottery ticket. I fell down a YouTube hole about tiny machines you can run at home to mine Bitcoin, a long shot you play from your living room. (That little miner is still here; these days it earns its keep showing you the numbers instead.) Figuring out how it all actually works is how I met the Bitcoin node: the piece that checks every rule for itself, trusting no one.

I started on a Raspberry Pi and a 15-year-old, 120 GB drive. It worked, and then I wanted the real thing: a full node, built to last, speaking IPv4, IPv6 and Tor all at once. Once it was humming, I got curious about who it was talking to out there. First a little script printing countries. Then a flat map. Neither was enough.

So the globe was born, and I haven't stopped since. Now I surface everything I can and put it on screen, free, for anyone, so it's here the day you want to look. It's a solo project and I like it that way, but I'd love to watch it grow, so new ideas are always welcome.

Three steps, in order of commitment. Take the ones you want.

01Watch

You're already doing it. The globe is the whole network, live: every dot is a real machine talking to ours. Want it calmer? Pulse turns it into big, quiet numbers made for a spare screen or a TV. And when you're after the markets, Market is the trading floor: a price chart that literally sees the blockchain (every new block lands right on the candles), with the big trades ticking past and liquidations the moment they hit. No login, nothing sold to you.

Want the network to tap you on the shoulder? The 🔔 alerts (cheap fees, your transaction confirming, a whale on the move) work with no account at all; your settings never leave your browser. We never learn who you are.

Type any block number into the 🔍 on the globe and my node reads you what's written inside. People carved messages into Bitcoin, forever. Try 666666. Or 0. I went through thousands of them and kept the ones worth your time: love notes in the halving blocks, a birth, a whole Declaration of Independence. What people write into Bitcoin.

Costs nothingTakes you're done

🌍 Open the globe 📺 Open Pulse 📈 Open Market ✍️ Read the messages

02Run a node

The real step. Everything on this site is what our two nodes see and check for themselves. Run one of your own and you stop taking anyone’s word for it: your machine verifies every block and every coin against the rules, on its own.

Any old PC will do; Bitcoin Core does the rest. A “pruned” node checks everything on ~15 GB of disk; keep the full history and you’ll want about a terabyte. Either way, give it a weekend to sync the chain from strangers. Watching it catch up is half the fun.

When yours is up, open the ONION card on the globe, tap our address to copy it, drop it in your config, and our nodes find each other over Tor. Welcome to the club.

Costs an old PC + pennies of powerTakes a weekend of syncing

📖 How to run a full node

03Mine with us

The deep end, and the fun one. A pocket-size miner (a Bitaxe-class box, a couple hundred dollars, quieter than a laptop fan) can hash on block templates built by your own node, thanks to DATUM. Nobody upstream decides what goes in your block.

You'll read nonsense about mining income elsewhere. At this size you're not buying income, you're buying a lottery ticket that also makes Bitcoin harder to censor. Pooled on Ocean it pays real satoshis, not a salary. A block found by home miners is a block nobody could stop.

Ours is a ~5 TH/s box sitting beside the Canada node, and every candidate block it works on carries btcglobe.live in its signature. You can watch it climb on Pulse, live.

Costs a couple hundred dollarsTakes an evening once your node runs

⛏ Watch our miner live 📖 DATUM & Ocean

What runs this place

✓ Two home nodes, one in Canada and one in Romania, hear everything you see here.

✓ A small rented server relays the public site, so our home connections stay private.

✓ A tiny miner works on our own block templates (DATUM → Ocean, paid pro-rata).

✕ No accounts, no cookies, no ad pixels, no analytics SDK. The server keeps a self-hosted visit count by country, and that's it.

The parts we don't control: Cloudflare sits in front as a shield and cache; like any CDN, it sees traffic. The BTC price is the one thing a node can't hear; it comes from a public market API. Peer locations come from a public IP-to-country lookup, and peer IPs themselves never leave the server. Push alerts store an endpoint and a threshold, nothing else.

Something looks off? Tell me: [email protected]. It lands in a real mailbox.

For makers: the data, free to build on

Everything on the globe and Pulse comes from four public endpoints. No key, no signup, CORS open. Point your ESP32, your RGB lamp or your dashboard at them and go.

GET/api/metaheight · fees · price · mempool · peers

GET/api/nodesthe two nodes + the little miner, live

GET/api/history?window=24hfee & mempool weather, 5-min samples

GET/api/journalrecords & first-times our nodes noticed

$ curl -s https://btcglobe.live/api/meta

Answers are cached 10–60 s at the edge, so polling faster than once a minute buys you nothing. Be gentle, it's one Python process on a small server. And if you build something, show me: [email protected].