darknode

darknode is a DarkFi full node running on a Raspberry Pi 5 in my flat, plus the telemetry stack around it. Since June it’s been running 24/7 next to a Monero miner on 8 GB of RAM, both inside hard cgroup budgets so neither can take the host down.

Every 60 seconds the node publishes its own state — memory split per service, host temperature, hashrate, block height, peer count — to a public panel at reymom.xyz/darknode. It also records all of it locally, together with the full P2P event stream from darkfid’s own dnet instrumentation: every channel open and close, every ping, every peer discovery attempt.

The point isn’t exactly the dashboard. Nobody publishes what it actually costs to take part in a privacy network, and if that cost is high the network centralizes no matter how good its cryptography is. So I’m measuring it on the cheapest hardware I could make work, and writing up everything that breaks along the way. Two posts so far, a third in September, and the deployment guide went upstream as a PR to the DarkFi book.