Whether you’re a total beginner who has just discovered cryptocurrency, or a crypto expert who has been involved since the early days, there’s lots of ways you can get involved in the local crypto community.
Everyone has different reasons for taking an interest. For some people it’s the trading aspect, others are fascinated by the technology, or maybe its the power cryptocurrency has to change the world?
What ever it is that captivates your attention, by getting involved you’ll both benefit from meeting new and interesting people as well raising awareness and helping cryptocurrency grow and evolve.
Here’s a few ideas;
Join us on Facebook. We have a small but well established Facebook group primarily for people based around the East-Midlands. Of course anyone with an interest in Crypto is very welcome no matter where you are in the world. The other Admins and I do our very best to ensure the group is friendly and informative for everyone, no matter what their level of experience. We try our best to keep out all the spam and scams.
Follow us on Twitter. We are active on twitter and regularly tweet with some of the latest Crypto news, information, and gossip. We also keep our followers up-to-date with any Local news, events, and meet-ups that might be of interest.
Some of our tweets might be a little confusing to the total beginner but if you’ve got any questions don’t hesitate to comment and we’ll do our best to try and explain things.
Join our Telegram chat. We have recently set up a Telegram chat for more lighthearted conversation, this is another great way to meet other local Crypto enthusiasts. Again, we try our best to keep it spam and scam free. This chat is intended to be an enjoyable place to be for everyone.
Use and accept cryptocurrency as payment. Probably the best thing you can do for both the local community and cryptocurrency as a whole is use it. If you own a business, why not consider accepting bitcoin/crypto as payment. (Don’t forget to let us know so we can add your business to the ‘Local businesses which accept bitcoin’ page).
If you would like more information on how to get started with accepting bitcoin payments please check out our merchant information page.
If you want to accept crypto and change it back to GBP at point of payment there are several payment processing companies in the UK who can make this easy. Our recommendation would be CoinCorner.
If you don’t have a business you could still try and encourage cryptocurrency payments between friends and family. If they haven’t used crypto before, why not demonstrate how easy it can be to use.
Run a Bitcoin Node. Another fantastic way you can help and support the bitcoin network is to run a bitcoin full node.
Don’t get this confused with mining, you will NOT receive any payment or rewards for running a node. You will however be playing a very important part in helping secure the bitcoin network. Without volunteers running full nodes the bitcoin network couldn’t function.
Full nodes help secure the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further nodes.
The node software can easily run on any modern PC. Once you have downloaded ‘bitcore core’ on your PC, it will take a while (~10 days depending on the spec of your PC) to download the entire bitcoin blockchain from the genesis block. Once complete, your node will seek connections to other nodes and begin playing its part in the worldwide bitcoin network.
Many people already volunteer to run full nodes — but more volunteers are needed to allow bitcoin to continue to grow and scale.
Don’t worry, setting up a node on your PC is reasonably simple for anyone with basic technical understanding. If you’re struggling and need assistance, don’t hesitate to post on any of our social media channels and we’ll try and assist.
If you want a ‘cheaper to run’ option that uses less electricity than most household PC’s, we highly recommend checking out the Raspiblitz project. This is a bitcoin full node with lightning functionality that can be ran on a Raspberry Pi (small single board computer costing around £60). All the details you need to get the Raspiblitz Bitcoin node running, including shopping list and detailed build instruction can be found on the projects github page here.
If you are looking for a quicker easier option you could also consider purchasing a ‘plug and play’ node. There are various different models available but most are prebuilt nodes running on small and economical single board computers.
for more information and details on different ‘plug and play’ nodes available please see https://node.guide/plug-and-play/
Before you get started, we highly recommend checking out the information on bitcoin.org. This gives more detail on the benefits and risks to consider before setting up and running your own full node. They also have a step-by-step setup guide for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.