Tried an experiment today with results that showed again that Grin is an ideal money for self sovereignty. The question I had was, can the poorest Grinner self host a node on ridiculously minimal dedicated Hardware and internet connection, and will it sync faster than a Bitcoin node using new tech including an NVME drive?
Conditions
Internet Speed: 50Mbps symmetrical
Grin Computer: Lenovo M32 thin client new from ebay for $35 shipped
Bitcoin computer: Lenovo Thinkpad T480 quad core i7 w/ HT and NVME SSD
PC Specs
CPU: Intel Celeron 847 1.1GHz Dual core w/ HT
RAM: 2GB DDR3
DISK: 16GB SATA DOM SSD
OS: Fresh install of Debian 12 Headless
Results
Grin FTW in ~6 hours. And it was no fluke as I had two identical Grin machines that both synced simultaneously and beat the Bitcoin core time by an hour. I only used 26% of my /home directory so I’ll definitely be adding pihole DHCP/DNS server and a Wireguard server as well and have a HA failover setup where I can tunnel in and swtich the port the miners are looking for nodes on quickly in case of some kind of failure.
After many nodes spun up, I really think Grin has the best UX for node running as nothing is ambiguous and the clean TUI spelling everything out is a great feature I don’t personally use, but I’m surprised other chains don’t utilize something like it. People hate uncertainty and that plus the straightforward slatepack transactions means I never get the feeling that I might be in danger of losing my Grin at all.