docs/_core/smart/neon-node.md

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Running a Neon Testnet Node

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"Neon" is phase 1 of the Stacks 2.0 testnet. In Neon, you can run a Stacks node and participate in proof-of-burn mining.

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Download and build stacks-blockchain

The first step is to ensure that you have Rust and the support software installed.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

From there, you can clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/blockstack/stacks-blockchain.git

cd stacks-blockchain

Then build the project:

cargo build

Building the project on ARM:

cargo build --features "aarch64" --no-default-features

Setup your Proof-of-Burn miner

In this phase of the testnet, miners will be burning BTC to participate in leader election. In order to mine, you'll need to configure your node with a BTC keychain, and you'll need to fund it with BTC. We're providing a BTC faucet to make it easy to run a miner.

Let's start by generating a keypair:

cargo run --bin blockstack-cli generate-sk --testnet

# Output
# {
#  secretKey: "b8d99fd45da58038d630d9855d3ca2466e8e0f89d3894c4724f0efc9ff4b51f001",
#  publicKey: "02781d2d3a545afdb7f6013a8241b9e400475397516a0d0f76863c6742210539b5",
#  stacksAddress: "ST2ZRX0K27GW0SP3GJCEMHD95TQGJMKB7G9Y0X1MH"
# }

TODO: guidance / update on generating a BTC address from this keypair.

Once you have your BTC address, head over to our testnet website to use the BTC faucet:

TODO: URL, guidance for BTC faucet

Now that you have some testnet BTC, you'll need to configure your Stacks node to use this wallet.

Open up the file testnet/Stacks.toml. Find the section that starts with [burnchain]. Update that section so that it looks like this:

[burnchain]
chain = "bitcoin"
mode = "neon"
peer_host = "127.0.0.1" # todo(ludo): update URL with neon.blockstack.org when deployed
burnchain_op_tx_fee = 1000
commit_anchor_block_within = 10000
rpc_port = 3000
peer_port = 18444

TODO: update peer_host, and how do you specify your BTC keychain?

Running your mining node

Now that you're all set up, you can run your miner. In the command line, run:

cargo testnet ./testnet/Stacks.toml

TODO: some way of confirming that the miner is running - expected logs, explorer, etc?