Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built. Bitcoin Core requires a one-time download of about 400GB of data plus a further 5-10GB per month. By default, you will need to store all of that data, but if you enable pruning, you can store as little as 6GB total without sacrificing any security. For more information about setting up Bitcoin Core, please read the full node guide. Download verification is optional but highly recommended. Performing the verification steps here ensures that you have not downloaded an unexpected or tampered version of Bitcoin, which may result in loss of funds. Experienced users who don't mind performing additional steps can take advantage of Bitcoin Core's reproducible builds and the signed checksums generated by contributors who perform those builds.
Features
- Bitcoin Core requires a one-time download of about 400GB of data
- It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built
- Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development
- Reproducible builds allow anyone with a copy of Bitcoin Core's MIT-licensed source code to build identical binaries to those distributed
- Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development
- Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license