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Additional questions and concept

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source/support/concepts.rst
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@@ -131,3 +131,12 @@ If a malicious third party were to intercept a request, they would see a garbled
When you use Tor to communicate with services running on the Embassy, all the traffic is onion routed and encrypted, and there are no Tor exit nodes involved - it's totally private with no configuration needed.
Furthermore, every service on the Embassy has a different Tor address, including the device itself. This is for privacy reasons - should one Tor address be exposed, the others will not be compromised. Tor addresses are actually ed25519 keys, which means they also provide all the benefits of cryptographically secure private/public keys.
.. _node:
Bitcoin Full Node
=================
The Embassy runs a Bitcoin Full Node. When most people say "full node" what they mean (or should mean) is "fully validating node", meaning that the node is capable of enforcing the consensus rules of Bitcoin by accepting, validating, and relaying every transaction and block produced by the network. Fully validating nodes are necessary for Bitcoin to exist and function properly and are what protect the network from attackers attempting to bypass the consensus rules. A fully validating node (aka full node) does not need to store the entire blockchain to accomplish this. A node that stores the entire blockchain is called a "full archival node". It is the same as a full node, except that it stores every single valid transaction and block ever produced by the network. There are not many reasons why an individual would want to run a full archival node. Most of the benefits of node operatorship are encompassed by a basic full node described above. Full archival nodes have the added benefit of enabling a block explorer. For instace, if you were interested in looking up the history of a particular address or viewing the details of a transaction, neither of which were your own. If an address or transaction is your own, you can view those details using a pruned node.
All that said, it will soon be possible to run a full archival node with he embassy, should you determine you want block explorer functionality. This will require plugging in an external hard drive to the embassy and changing a setting in the app, and also a resycnhing of the blockchain from genesis.

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source/support/faq.rst
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@@ -80,6 +80,10 @@ Are my Internet requests anonymous and secure?
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EmbassyOS and every service on the Embassy serve their own Tor Hidden Services with unique Tor addresses. The private keys used to create these addresses are generated on your phone or computer when you first set up the Embassy. No one, not even Start9, has any idea what your Tor addresses are, let alone the password(s) you choose to authenticate with them.
Can I mine Bitcoin with this?
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No, you can not.
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Setup and Troubleshooting
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@@ -111,3 +115,15 @@ Please make sure the service is started by viewing it in the Services tab in the
Why does the Bitcoin service take so long to be ready?
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On first install, the Bitcoin service must verify the entire history of transactions in order to verify transactions going forward. This can take approximately a week depending on your internet connection. You can continue to use the Embassy normally in the meantime.
Does the Embassy run a full archival Bitcoin node?
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The Embassy runs a full node, but does not run a full *archival* node, it's pruned. This means it does not store the entire Blockchain. As it syncs, it discards blocks and transactions it does not need.
It is fully validating and verifying consensus all the way from Genesis. Really, the only reason to store the entire Blockchain is if you want to run a block explorer. Learn more :ref:`here <node>`.
I want to understand in depth how a Service works and it's available configuration options. Where can I go to learn more?
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Depending on the app, the config options can be quite involved. Bitcoin Core, for example, has an enormous amount of complex options, almost none of which are useful to a normal user doing normal things. We chose some very sane defaults that should work for normal use cases. Here is an example config from the Bitcoin `GitHub <https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/share/examples/bitcoin.conf>`.
By reading the descriptions in the link above, as well as doing some extra searching on your favorite search engine, you can begin to discover all the crazy ways in which someone can customize their Bitcoin node. Here is another list of `possible options <https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Running_Bitcoind>`.
We translated much of (but not all of) the tons of options into a clean and easy-to-use GUI with toggles, dropdowns, inputs, etc, which is what you're seeing in your config screen. If you notice the little "?" icons on the left of each option, clicking them will provide a brief description as to what the option does. Also, our config GUI restricts the possible values you can enter such that you don't accidentally crash Bitcoin. That said, be very careful about just randomly changing things, lest your node starts to behave strangely.