Ledger SatStack is a lightweight bridge to connect Ledger Live with your personal Bitcoin full node. It's designed to allow Ledger Live users use Bitcoin without compromising on privacy, or relying on Ledger's infrastructure.
Running a full node is the only way you can use Bitcoin in a completely trustless way. A full node downloads the entire blockchain, and checks it against Bitcoin's consensus rules, and contributes to the decentralization and economic strength of Bitcoin. However, a far more compelling reason to run your own node is privacy. ...read more.
Running a node can be difficult for some users, and has associated costs in terms of network bandwidth and disk usage. This is why Live connects to Bitcoin nodes running on Ledger's infrastucture, wrapped around by indexer and explorer services to ensure fast queries. While security and privacy is core to Ledger, one can make a theoretical case that Ledger can spy on transaction details, or even censor certain addresses from using Ledger's services.
SatStack aims to render Ledger's infrastructure dispensable, by allowing users to connect Ledger Live with their personal Bitcoin full node.
Ledger SatStack is a standalone Go application, that acts as a bridge between the Ledger Live application and a Bitcoin Core full-node. It exposes a REST interface to the open-source JS library embedded by Live, and communicates to the Bitcoin node over RPC. It utilizes the transport layer and data-structures of btcd.
- Bitcoin Nano app
2+ - Bitcoin Core
0.22.0+. - Ledger Live (desktop)
2.44.0+. txindex=1inbitcoin.confis not mandatory, but recommended.- Wallet should NOT be disabled (attn. Raspiblitz users).
The easiest way of getting started is to use the dedicated setup flow directly on Ledger Live. A detailed guide is available here.
Simply follow these steps:
- Plug in your Ledger device via USB.
- Enter your PIN code on the device, and open the Bitcoin app.
- Run the
scripts/getdescriptorscript, as shown below.
$ cd scripts
$ python3 -m venv venv # ensure Python 3.8+
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
(venv) $ ./getdescriptor --scheme native_segwit --chain main --account 3
External: wpkh([b91fb6c1/84'/0'/3']xpub6D1gvTP...VeMLtH6/0/*)
Internal: wpkh([b91fb6c1/84'/0'/3']xpub6D1gvTP...VeMLtH6/1/*)if you get an unsupported hash type ripemd160 error, please see this
Create a config file lss.json in your home directory.
You can use this sample config file as a template.
Add "torproxy": "socks5://127.0.0.1:9050", to connect to a Tor client running locally so that satstack can reach a full node behind Tor.
Replace the rpcurl with the .onion address of your node.
-
depth: override the number of addresses to derive and import in the Bitcoin wallet. Defaults to1000. -
birthday: set the earliest known creation date (YYYY/MM/DDformat), for faster account import. Defaults to2013/09/10(BIP0039 proposal date). Refer to the table below for a list of safe wallet birthdays to choose from.Event Date (YYYY/MM/DD) BIP0039 proposal created 2013/09/10 (default) First ever BIP39 compatible Ledger device (Nano) shipped 2014/11/24 First ever Ledger Nano S shipped 2016/07/28
Make sure you've read the requirements first, and that your node is configured properly.
Here's the recommended configuration for bitcoin.conf:
# Enable RPC server
server=1
# Enable indexes
txindex=1
blockfilterindex=1
# Set RPC credentials
rpcuser=<user>
rpcpassword=<password>
Then launch bitcoind like this:
bitcoindPre-built binaries are available for download on the releases page (Linux, Windows, MacOS). Extract the tarball, and launch it as:
./lssIf you want to build lss yourself, just do the following:
(make sure you have mage installed first)
mage release # or "mage build" for a development buildOn startup, SatStack will wait for the Bitcoin node to be fully synced, and import your accounts. This can take a while.
# environment variables `EXPLORER` and `EXPLORER_SATSTACK` should point at the address
# where `lss` is listening (can be a differnet computer/server)
$ EXPLORER=http://127.0.0.1:20000 <Ledger Live executable>If you get error=failed to load wallet: -4: Wallet file verification failed. SQLiteDatabase: Unable to obtain an exclusive lock on the database, is it being used by another bitcoind? maybe this is because you have bitcoind windows opened, if this is the case, please try closing them and restart lss.
For feedback or support, please tag @adrien_lacombe and @Ledger on Twitter. To report any bugs related to full node on Ledger Live, you can create issues on this repository.
Contributions in the form of code improvements, documentation, tutorials, and feedback are most welcome.
For contributions to the code, we recommend these guidelines.
On startup, satstack will display a message about Bitcoin, randomly picked from a curated collection of interesting quotes, facts, email excerpts, etc. You are welcome to contribute by creating a pull request modifying this file (includes guidelines for editing the file). Here's an example of how it is rendered:
- Extracts from The Complete Satoshi by the Nakamoto Institute.
- Quotes by Satoshi, Hal Finney.
- Excerpts from bitcointalk.org, email lists, etc.
- Public criticisms of Bitcoin by famous people, media, etc. Bitcoin Obituaries is a great source.
Please mention the source when you make a contribution, so we can attribute the original author(s) and include a copy of the license if required.