 It's no secret that governments are doing all that they can to kill off people's trust in Monero, whether it's spreading FUD in the news about law enforcement being able to trace it, or pressuring exchanges to delist the currency, or to just make it outright illegal to use Monero at all in some countries. But Monero keeps on going strong because the technology actually works, and it keeps proving to work despite all of these attacks against it. But just like any other tech, Monero works best when it's used correctly. You've got to use a trusted wallet first and foremost, and it's recommended that you run your own node. This has a number of benefits. It helps keep the network safe and decentralized. Your node will relay transactions to other nodes on the blockchain, and if you run an open node, meaning others are able to connect to you, then they can use your node to verify transactions for them if they don't have the capacity to run a node themselves. Self-hosting your own Monero node also gives you some more independence and more confidence in using Monero since you don't have to rely on someone else to verify your transactions for you. It is possible for people to run malicious remote nodes where they can block your transactions, or they can trick you into thinking that transactions have gone through when they really haven't, and whenever you connect to a remote node, they're of course able to log your IP address, which might be a concern for some people that are using Monero. Now, although running your own node is something that's recommended to do, it's not always going to be possible to do this because of the space requirement. Running a full node requires having the entire Monero blockchain downloaded to your computer, which is over 170 gigabytes in size, and it's growing every day. It's not practical to do this on all the devices you might want to use Monero on, so this is why the mobile wallets, the mobile apps for Monero, and even the desktop software by default is going to have you connecting to some kind of a remote node. So if you have to trust a remote node, it might as well be one that you own, right? Because after all, who can you trust better than you? Now, the system requirements for a full Monero node can make putting it on a remote VPS a little bit costly. I mean, as you see here, you only need a dual core processor and about four gigs of RAM, but that 160 plus gigabytes of SSD space can make renting out a VPS a little bit expensive. So I think a full Monero node is the perfect candidate for at home hosting on an old computer like I'm doing or on a Raspberry Pi. Now, since you don't have a static IP, or you most likely don't have a static IP at your home, you'll have to either purchase a domain and then use a dynamic DNS service to map that domain to your home IP address, and that's going to automatically update the DNS records whenever your home IP changes, or you could simply host the full node at home as a hidden onion service and then connect to it that way. So since onions and Monero goes so well together, I think we should go with option B. So now I'm going to go ahead and SSH into my Monero node, which is currently running on a ThinkPad. Now, one big tip if you've already downloaded the full Monero blockchain to a desktop or something else like that is to copy over this LMDB folder, or you could even just copy over this whole bit Monero folder to that Raspberry Pi or Home Server, whatever you're going to be running your 24-7 Monero node on, because inside of it is going to be this data.mdb file, which is the entire Monero blockchain. I mean, not in this case, because it's only 65 gigs. If yours is around 65, 70 gigs or so, that means you've got the prune blockchain. But if you've got the full thing, it's going to be around probably 180 gigs, and you could just copy that over whenever you're going to run a Monero node, or if you're going to run another wallet with the full node downloaded, you could just use this to sync the majority of the blocks, and then obviously it's going to download whatever new blocks have been added to the blockchain while your wallet was offline. So anyway, that can save you a lot of time with setting this up. And the next thing that you're going to have to do is install Tor. And notice that I'm talking about the Tor service and not the Tor browser, right? Next, you'll want to open up as root, your Etsy Tor RC file. And if you don't want to run a Tor node, then you can skip most of the configuration that's in here. But you do need to find the line that says hidden service dur, uncomment that and also uncomment the one below it hidden service port, and update the port number both here and at the end to 18081, 18,081, leave the IP address and on the hidden service dur line, you can also update this to just whatever custom directory you want. And when we save this file, it's going to well, when we save this file and restart the Tor service, it's going to go ahead and create that hidden service directory with a few files in it that are for the hidden service, which we're going to take a look at in a minute. So right quit that and sudo system CTL restart Tor at default. And you can verify that it's working correctly with sudo system CTL status Tor at default. And so if you see that it's active running, then you know everything's okay. Now we can get our Monero node running. So the best software to use for running a Monero node is the Monero CLI wallet or that collection of software that you get with the CLI wallet from get Monero.org. Now, even though this includes software for a wallet, you don't actually need a Monero wallet to run a Monero node. So you don't have to worry about backing up your private keys or anything like that, you know, losing any cryptocurrency, any money. Now you can download the latest version of this wallet directly to your node box with this W get command right here. And I'll leave that in the description of this video. And like I mentioned earlier, if you've downloaded the whole Monero blockchain, then you can copy over that LMDB folder or really this whole bit Monero folder. And this big boy right here, 177 gigabytes in data.mdb is that Monero blockchain. So if you have that file in, well, like I said, basically the whole bit Monero folder, and you place that on your box already, then when you start up the Monero node, like the Monero daemon, it's going to automatically start syncing the blockchain from this file and then just like download whatever the latest blocks were for the last few minutes, few hours or whatever. But it's going to get you up and running a whole lot faster than if you have to sync everything starting from the first block. Now before we go ahead and start the Monero daemon, we need to copy over the content of this hostname file here inside of our hidden service directory. So if we go ahead and cat that out, you'll see that we get an onion address. And this onion address is going to be reachable on the tour network right now, as long as your tour service is running correctly. And as long as you don't have it blocked by any firewalls or anything like that. Now nothing is running on it right now, of course, but let's say you wanted to set up your very own website on tour, you could follow the same guide and then just use nginx instead of the Monero daemon or some other software to serve a web page or an FTP server or whatever it is you want to host on the tour network. And bam, you've got a site that's online or at least it's on the dark web. But when you do this, there's no need to buy a domain, there's no need to fuss with DNS settings or even forwarding ports on your router. Onions just work as long as you're using the tour browser. And then one other thing that you're going to need to do is inside of the bit Monero folder is a file called bitmonero.com. Go ahead and edit that you don't have to be root. But just make sure you uncomment these top two lines. And you can also uncomment this third line as well and then update the username and password variables to a well username and password. If you want to keep your node private that way, you know, no one else who well, they would also need the onion address, which I guess kind of makes it private. I mean, I guess it's unlikely someone will randomly stumble upon that. But, you know, if you don't want anyone connecting to your node for whatever reasons, you can go ahead and put a username password in there. I'm just going to go ahead and leave this one as an open node, though. So now that everything's in place, I'm going to go over to where I unzipped my Monero folder, my Monero CLI folder, and we're going to run that Monero daemon, Monerod, I guess, right there. And so it's going to tell you that it's loading up and the synchronization has started. You can see that my node is 47 blocks or about 1.6 hours behind. And it's already synced up 20 blocks. It's going a whole lot faster, right? Like imagine having to download all what is this 3 million some odd blocks yourself, it would take a very long time. And it says that we are now synchronized with the network. All right, so now if we come over to this Monero wallet, we should be able to add in our remote node. And of course, make sure that you put HTTP at the beginning of it. And our port number 18081, and you'll need to put in your username and password if you used one. And why not mark it as a trusted daemon? You don't have to, but I mean, if you ever were going to trust a daemon, it ought to be one that you're running yourself. And then it's going to go ahead and connect and boom, our wallet is synchronized, our daemon is synchronized, and we can start using Monero now if we wanted to without having to have that giant file here locally on this computer. Now, because this is an onion node, people connecting to us are not going to know our node's true IP address. And we're not going to know theirs because they can only connect to us through Tor. So if you want to use this remote node on your devices, you've got to make sure that they are first connected to the Tor network. So if your Monero wallet is on TalesOS or Hoonix, then you don't have to do anything else, right? You're done. You're already connected to Tor. But if you're on a mobile device, then you're going to have to make sure that cake wallet or whatever Monero app it is that you're using is tunneled through Orbot. So you can do that in Orbot settings, just make it so that certain apps automatically use Orbot. Or if you're on a desktop like I am here, you want to make sure that you first open up the Tor browser and of course connect to it, you know, if you don't have it set to connect by default. And then you're going to have the Tor daemon running in the background on your computer for the Tor browser. And then you can come over here to the interface in your Monero wallet and check this box for enabling a SOX 5 proxy and put in 127.001 for your IP address and then put in 91.50 for your port number. And then your Monero wallet is basically going to piggyback off of the Tor daemon that your browser is using. So pretty straightforward to do. And I don't think this setup would really be a problem since I think a lot of people that are using Monero are already using Tor anyway. And if you aren't using Monero together with Tor, you should try it out. Okay, Monero and onions, they pair nicely together. And Monero nodes themselves, they really don't use that much bandwidth. So the blocks on Monero, they're usually less than 100 kilobytes. You know, Monero does have a dynamic block size like this is, you know, a chart of the block size history, you can see typically it is under 100k in size, even lower than that really, I'd say it probably averages close to around 70k. And a new block is downloaded every two minutes. Or a new block is mined every two minutes, obviously not, they're not all going to be mined by you, but they'll be downloaded by you. So you know, it's really not a whole lot of bandwidth that's required for this device, like if you have bandwidth limitations for your home network, like a lot of people do, it's not going to run that up. And it's also something that the Tor network is more than capable of handling. And of course, if you're running a Monero node like this, you're only a few edits away from actually running a Tor node, okay, like the file that we were just editing here. So this is my Tor RC file, right? So this file that we had to edit to set up the hidden service for our Monero service, you only have to make a few more edits in here to actually set up a Tor node, right? So if you have say unlimited bandwidth with your ISP or you can even put bandwidth caps inside of this file here, if you do have limited bandwidth, like it's right here, yeah, limit how much relay traffic you'll allow. But anyway, you're literally just a few edits in this file away from running a Tor node as well as a Monero node, which is actually going to contribute bandwidth to this wonderful network, the Tor network that Monero users are really going to start relying on as governments crack down on Monero more and more. But that's it for this video, guys. Like and comment to hack the algorithm and consider shopping at my online store, base.win, where you can buy Libre Merch and also pay in Monero, which is going to earn you an automatic 10% discount at checkout. Check it out and have a great day.