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Additional questions and concept

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2021-03-03 11:46:56 -07:00
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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.