By now many bitcoiners have already embraced the great narrative started by legendary Bitcoiner and educator Andreas Antonopoulos: “Not your Keys, Not your Coins” . This has resulted in community’s debates being focused on the topic of custodial vs non custodial wallets.
Thankfully, Self-custody has never been easier, and it will continue its evolution to make it even easier for those who still fear the responsibility of safeguarding their own money.
Unfortunately, most wallets (specially on-chain only) lack a solid business model beyond those enabling privacy and or selling hardware wallet devices. We know the wallet wars will follow a similar path to what has happened in fintech fiat, where it is mainly a game of being the wallet of choice for merchants and/or users.
At Shuken, despite our extensive experience in payments and wallets, we decided not to enter the wallet game, mainly because of the potential regulatory implications around the “flow of funds.” However, we truly respect and admire those who are fighting hard on that front.
We believe the time has come to introduce a new and event more important narrative:
Running Your Own Bitcoin Node: “Not your Node, not your Rules.”
What Email was to Web 1 is what Nodes will be in the Bitcoin era. Running a node is not just important because it provides better privacy and protects the network, but because it helps make Bitcoin decentralized. Having an army of people ready to fight, helps Bitcoin engage in even bigger battles than the one already won during the time of the blocksize wars.
There’s a lot to discuss about the possibilities of nodes. We envision healthy debate among node runners similar to those seen in computing where users have choice between “Intel inside, AMD, or Mac M2” to power their nodes. Similar debates have occurred around ordinals and filters.
We are fueled by our mission to protect and enable access to the Bitcoin network by helping deploy an “army” of noderunners with a privacy-by-design approach. Having more node runners enhances the decentralization of the Bitcoin network, improves personal privacy, while also distributing the responsibility of validating and propagating transactions. This increased decentralization improves the network’s security, resilience, and resistance to censorship or manipulation by any single entity.
We build with the ethos of having the best possible usage of tools and services for both noderunners and enterprises, while enabling new business models and opportunities in this once in a lifetime opportunity that Bitcoin has brought us all.
The Shuken Agenda: 1 Million Bitcoin Node Runners By 2030
In the open source world we always say that we “build on the shoulders of giants”, hence, we are gradually making our node tech fully open source, so we can have others join the movement to help reach 1 million noderunners by 2030, if not before.
Source: https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/8y/
Our first flagship product was built with security in mind with a fully no logs/no kyc private cloud node offering. We offered different services: from just a Full node with Fulcrum and our Explorer to a fully functional BTCPAYSERVER node bundle with Lightning Network support, to Enterprise grade node services.
Our dedication and commitment to our mission goes beyond just providing services under our brand. We’ve developed a white-label option for companies, including wallets, exchanges, and hosting providers. This option allows them to easily offer their existing customer base a streamlined method to have a complete Bitcoin node.
As privacy awareness grows, groups like Proton have experienced remarkable expansion. The “de-googling” trend is also picking up speed. At Shuken, we see our innovative private cloud node solution, designed with zero logs and no KYC, as a potential game-changer for increasing node adoption.
Internal divisions in the Bitcoin community are worrisome. Strong disagreements can be cult-like, with those not supporting certain approaches (e.g., from company Y) being excluded and seen as a bigger threat than external forces like the World Economic Forum. (WEF). This infighting diminishes progress and weakens Bitcoin’s potential. It is human nature to try to get something with so much potential to their own interest, but we hope that the original Bitcoin vision does not get replaced by the same dystopian and control we have in Fiat.
SaaS (Sovereignty as a Service)
We aim to be as neutral as we possibly can and focus on building our SaaS (Sovereignty as a Service) solutions where we envision a future where most people will have the option to choose the level of sovereignty as they want at any given time.
But first, we need to help everyone to become a noderunner!
This is just the beginning for Shuken as we are working on multiple innovations, especially our Shuken Indexer (foundational work for our unique explorer) which we see as an innovation needed outside the different Electrum implementations in the market.
Final Remarks
At Shuken, we believe that true incentives must be built for noderunners and not just the miners. We invite everyone to get started as soon as they can in the node journey, which is probably the mother of all rabbit holes!
Lastly, we would like to share a couple of insights that hopefully will be of value to other builders out there:
- Build what you truly believe in, and your work will never be wasted
- We know it seems easier to become an influencer talking about things than building them directly. We all know that during the gold rush the ones who initially made the most money were not the miners but the people selling the shovels
- Do not waste time talking to VCs who usually just simply pay lip-service to the importance of sovereignty. Most will push you into the same old traps as FIAT VCs
- Ignore the noise and avoid entering into any wars that will only deplete your energy. Be true to yourself and help others build it too, no matter how much of a competitor they might be
- Copper cables and fiber optics were hard to sell once, but eventually everyone came to build on those. We know it is hard to be on the infrastructure side of things when it comes to Bitcoin, but the most exciting part if not the most important, is to build on the rails of the Bitcoin era. Those are the nodes and node related tech that will enable wallets, and commerce to happen, sooner, rather than later
And remember, while this cycle everyone is watching ETFs to make their fiat dream of NGU (number go up), the real metric we should care about is NNGU (Number of nodes go up)
Happy sovereignty!
*A version of this post has also been published in Bitcoinnews.com who we thank personally for spreading the node narrative!
