Author: Brian Lockhart 2018-06-13 15:32:11
Published on: 2018-06-13T15:32:11+00:00
A user on the bitcoin-dev mailing list asked whether it is possible for a Lightning node to access an already-existing full node instead of requiring its own dedicated instance of bitcoind. Christian Decker, a developer at Blockstream, responded that Lightning nodes need to monitor the network for transactions and suspicious activity, but the bitcoind sitting next to the Lightning node does not need to keep an index of the transactions. Therefore, running with "-txindex" is not necessary to run a Lightning node. Pruned nodes should work as long as the current blockchain head that the Lightning node has seen does not fall into the pruned range since, in that case, it won't be able to fetch and process the blocks anymore. Decker hopes that their reliance on bitcoind can be minimized in the future.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T02:11:30.625385+00:00