The new RaspberryPi 5 has arrived and I've stuck it in a new Argon40 V3 M.2 NVME case.

The reason for this was that after running Umbrel for 3 years the 1 TB NVME drive was up to 800GB and it was estimated there were about 10 months left before it filled up completely. This was mostly due to Taproot (which combined with Segwit) allowed for an explosion of blockchain bloat since last year. Umbrel had just released version 1.0 of their software and I was trying to figure out a path forward. Should I just upgrade to version 1 and buy a bigger SSD and continue running the rPi4 8GB? Should I upgrade all the hardware? Should I switch the OS to another platform?

I felt that 1) having a bitcoin node to use was essential to maintaining sovereignty and 2) Umbrel was very successful, they had taken an open source project and commercialized it. I had watched it grow up from being a bitcoin node to adding apps and becoming a home server project. Most recently they were selling their own hardware for it. But I also felt like it was moving away from its roots as a bitcoin node and becoming too much a home-server, with a side of bitcoin. 

I had considered other options including Aaron Dewes Citadel which was a fork of early umbrel open-source code meant to be just a bitcoin node. Also MyNode which was also successful and selling its own integrated hardware solution. Casa was no longer making home nodes but I had decided against them as they tried to expand by offering support for Ethereum and other crypto tokens. Start9 was also considered and they seemed to have premium hardware. But in the end I felt like Samourai team was doing the most for creating privacy tools with their wallet and Whirlpool mixing services. RoninDojo had forked the backend dojo to power the Samourai wallet for single board computers and was selling a hardware node based on the RockPro64. 

The plan was to create a Samourai Dojo based on the new rPi5.  Fortunately or unfortunately, my existing Argon40 case for the rPi4 would not work for the rPi5, so I had to buy a new one. But there were some nice upgrades that came along with it. So that's where this project started, and immediately was met with challenges.

The week the hardware showed up Samourai website was shut down by the FBI and their servers in Iceland were seized. The main coder and CEO were arrested (one in Pennsylvania, one in Portugal) and the Whirlpool service ceased to function. The government was coming after Bitcoin privacy. 

So cobbling together a working system was going to be a bit of a manual slog.

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