easyNode

September 2026. Our nodes spent twenty hours on a minority fork from height 210496, and 0.6.18 shipped that morning saying "follows the live chain". Both incident write-ups are kept, unedited, with the numbers and the wrong turns left in: docs/incident-2026-09-05-fork.md and docs/incident-2026-09-06-bodyless-tower.md, the day after, when every number said "split" and it was not one. What they cost is in the releases since: 0.6.19 detects a chain it cannot obtain, 0.6.20 lets any node witness a fork for a wallet, and 0.6.21 fixed the peering underneath it — the app was naming eleven peers for the engine's eight manual slots, so three were never dialled at all.

One cause is still upstream and not ours to fix: the engine refuses a live-chain node as a body source and then bans it for asking about its own chain (btxchain/btx#142). Tracked in #38.

Run a real BTX node from home, on the machine you already own.

easyNode is a desktop app that installs, configures and supervises btxd, the BTX full node, for someone who does not want to run a daemon by hand.

It is open source, as of September 2026, and this repository is the whole of it. MIT licensed: the app, the shared engine library, the release recipe, the CI that builds it, and the gates that must pass before any release changes which btxd your machine runs. The only thing deliberately absent is the signing key, which is not in any repository and never will be.

It grew inside a private monorepo next to the easyBTX miner, and it was moved out and opened on purpose. Software that asks people to help decide which chain is real has no business being unauditable. The miner is a separate product and stays closed; the test for whether a file belongs here is whether it is part of running a node.

Get it

easybtx.com/node — the download page always points at the current release for macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (x86-64 .AppImage and .deb) and Windows. Verified 2026-09-04: every link on it returns 200.

The app updates itself from there afterwards, and will only ever install a build signed by the release key.

On Linux, both downloads can update themselves, in different ways. The .AppImage replaces itself in place without asking. A .deb install, from 0.7.0 on, installs the new .deb after asking for your password once, because its files live under /usr and belong to root. On a machine with no desktop to show that prompt, a .deb copy tries once, then shows the command to install it by hand with apt, and it does the same for each new version. A .deb copy older than 0.7.0 moves to 0.7.0 by hand once.

⚠ Do not use the "Latest" button on the releases repo. EasyBTX-releases hosts both this app and the easyBTX miner, which is a different product, and the repo-global Latest pointer belongs to the miner on purpose — a node release that captured it would break the miner's updater. Node releases are tagged node-vX.Y.Z. Pick one of those, or just use the download page.

If you want to know what the app itself will fetch, without installing anything, the update feed is public: easybtx.com/updater/latest-node.json.

Windows lags. macOS and Linux are on the current release; the last Windows build is 0.6.6 and there is no update path from it yet. The code compiles on Windows — what is missing is a release. See docs/node-release-recipe.md.

If you read one thing here, read Always on. It is the argument for the whole project: what BTX is actually short of, what running a node really costs you, and what it does not promise in return.

This repository is the app

Not a mirror of one. easyNode is developed here, released from here, and this is where a change belongs. If you are looking at a copy of these files somewhere else, that copy is downstream of this one.

That means the whole of it is here: the app, the shared engine library, the release recipe in docs/node-release-recipe.md, and the two engine gates in scripts/ that must both pass before any release changes which btxd users run. The only thing deliberately absent is the signing key, which is not in any repository and never will be.

If you want BTX to have a home client that anyone can audit and anyone can improve, this is the one to send patches to.

Why this exists

BTX needs nodes that are simply on. Not fast, not powerful, on. A trusted mirror serving an explorer or a wallet can only be as honest as the nodes around it, and right now there are not many of them.

The uncomfortable version, measured 2026-09-03: exactly one source on the whole network publishes a block hash at a given height. When our own explorer spent six hours following an orphaned block that morning, the only reason anybody could tell was that that one source happened to still be running.

More independent nodes is the fix. That is what this app is for.

What your machine can actually do

Roles are cumulative. A machine takes the highest one it qualifies for and keeps everything below it. Being useful does not require a good computer, but being an independent validator does, and we would rather say so than flatter you.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗