Start Bitcoin Core

Start your Bitcoin node and download the blockchain.

Startup

Configure bitcoind to automatically start at boot:

sudo systemctl enable bitcoind.service

Start bitcoind:

sudo systemctl start bitcoind.service

Initial Synchronization

Your node will now connect to other peers to download and verify the entire blockchain, block by block, starting from the genesis block on January 3, 2009.

Sync is in progress. This operation may take 3 to 7 days to complete.

Monitoring

Logs

To view the Bitcoin Core logs:

tail -f ~/.bitcoin/debug.log

You can monitor progress live by checking for height= or progress=.

bitcoin-cli

bitcoin-cli is part of Bitcoin Core and serves as a command-line interface for the JSON-RPC API.

Node Status

You can use it to monitor the status of your node and the synchronization progress:

bitcoin-cli -getinfo

Network Info

You can use it to check your integration with the P2P network:

bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo

If you're using Tor, note in the output how Bitcoin used the Tor control port to create an onion service for P2P on port 8333.

[...]
"localaddresses": [
    {
        "address": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.onion",
        "port": 8333,
        "score": 4
    }
[...]

You can find the full list of bitcoin-cli commands here.

Blockchain Data

Get the current block height:

bitcoin-cli getblockcount

Get some blockchain statstics:

bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo

Post Synchronization

Once fully synchronized, edit Bitcoin's config file located at ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf, and lower the value of dbcache to 500. Then, restart Bitcoin:

sudo systemctl restart bitcoind.service