Start geth with rinkeby chain Download Rinkeby json https://www.rinkeby.io/rinkeby.json Initialise datadir geth — datadir=$HOME/.rinkeby init rinkeby.json connect node to rinkeby network and start geth --networkid=4 --datadir=$HOME/.rinkeby --cache=1024 --syncmode=full --bootnodes=enode://a24ac7c5484ef4ed0c5eb2d36620ba4e4aa13b8c84684e1b4aab0cebea2ae45cb4d375b77eab56516d34bfbd3c1a833fc51296ff084b770b94fb9028c4d25ccf@52.169.42.101:30303

To add self signed certificates in macOS Sierra for testing, you need to create root CA certificate signed with SHA256 openssl req -x509 -nodes -sha256 -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout localhost.key -out localhost.cert and add it to System keychain using sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustAsRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain

btcd is an alternative full node bitcoin implementation Running docker container of btcd Install Docker, you can follow docker installation guide from here https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/ Pull docker btcd image docker pull niktrix/btcd-docker create directory to mount to docker container where btcd will download all blocks data, assure you have enough disk space mkdir /btcroot run btcd image as daemon docker run -d -p 8333:8333 -v /root:/btcdroot — name=”btcd-node” niktrix/btcd-docker

Bitcoin mining is different than running bitcoin fullnode, there is no incentive involved in running bitcoin full node 2. in layman term you can think bitcoin full node is like seeding your torrent. 3. As seeding in torrent helps to maintain health of file in torrent, running full node helps in bitcoin network health. 4. Bitcoin Full node downloads all blocks and it verifies all blocks hash to its previous block,

Blockchain is underlying technology used in cryptocurrencies, before you start reading about blockchain there are some prerequisite to read, distributed computing consensus algorithms hashing functions byzantine fault tolerance peer to peer network state machines Distributed blocks Merkle Tree