The Raspberry Standard for Bitcoin
Emergence of Open-source software being sold as hardware
Its always been a difficult problem for open source projects to thrive when there's so few ways to generate revenue. Recently there has been a rising popularity in generating revenue by "doing the deployment" part of a self-hosted open source application.
Apps such as BTCPay Server, bitcoin-core, LND, NextCloud, Cryptpad, etc require basic Linux terminal skills. Even with Linux being popular, only small portion of humanity is skilled enough to manage their own servers.
Projects like Umbrel and Casa node sell their software already installed and setup on a raspberry pi. All the end customer has to do is:
- buy their product (software installed on raspberry pi)
- connect it to their router with an ethernet cable
- ???
- profit
Why Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is one of the most popular FOSS projects out there. Though most people aren't benefiting from the self-sovereignty it is capable of providing. Bitcoin and its applications really shine where the user has complete over them. An ideal way of doing so is self hosting.
Selling bitcoind and its applications on a raspberry pi is a really cool idea that can help make self-sovereign bitcoin be available to more people. This also enables an indivisual to do more than just do bitcoin transactions. Apps like BTCPay Server are almost a neccesity for most bitcoin startups.
Bitcoin being the pioneer of open source money can move this field forward.
So here's the raspberry standard for bitcoin: Bitcoin and its applications should be light and optimized enough that they can run on the most common raspberry pi.
We succeed in this regard in most applications. Thanks to great people at Umbrel bitcoind, lnd and btcpay-server can all run in a single raspberry pi 4. Though I understand bitcoin mining is completely different game.
Benefits
Keeping the raspberry pi / Linux standard in vew when building self-hosted applications for bitcoin makes it easier for common people to use bitcoin. It makes the internet more decentralized and allows people to own their data.
This extends to other applications as well. However I beleive Bitcoin has the popularity and open-source community to make this mainstream.
People can start out using their raspberry pi for umbrel but quickly advance into using it for more things like Solid Pod (own your data), GhostBlog (own your blog), NextCloud (own your cloud storage).
Will self hosting ever go mainstream?
Probably not. But selling hardware instead of expecting users to install it on their own Linux server will definitely make it more popular and more importantly, make open-source profitable.