FREE · NO KEYS · FOR APPLE-SILICON MACS

BTX Keeper

A BTX Keeper is a small background node on your Mac whose one job is serving the network's signed block confirmations. One command installs it, one command removes it, and no keys or wallet are involved.

Share your Mac with the network. Keep the chain verifiable while you sleep.

The gap it fills

Most machines can no longer check BTX's proof of work themselves. They follow the chain using small signed confirmations passed from node to node. Those confirmations are the scarcest thing on the network: an independent census on 17 August 2026 found exactly one reachable node serving the full confirmation history. When it goes quiet, everyone without a qualified graphics chip stops in place.

Each confirmation is 208 bytes. The whole history is about 40 MB. What the network is short of is not storage or bandwidth, it is machines that are on.

What it costs you

About 10 GB of disk. It keeps recent blocks only, not the whole chain.
A trickle of bandwidth. Confirmations are tiny and rate-limited by the protocol.
Power while plugged in. On battery it pauses itself. Your display always sleeps normally.

What you get

The chain stays verifiable for people whose machines can't verify it alone, and that happened on your Mac. That is the whole deal. There is no payment and no token here, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not speaking for this project.

Install

Requires an Apple-silicon Mac, python3, and about 25 GB free during setup. Copy this one line into Terminal and press enter.

curl -fsSL https://easybtx.com/install-btx-keeper.sh | bash

That is the whole thing. It downloads the pinned BTX engine and checks it against the checksum written into the installer before running it, writes a safe configuration, loads a verified snapshot of the chain, and installs a background agent that runs on power and pauses on battery. If that download is ever unreachable it falls back to building the same pinned release from source, which takes about five minutes and needs Xcode or the Command Line Tools. If the node ever misbehaves, a watchdog stops it cleanly and leaves you a note in plain language. It never force-kills and never restarts on its own.

Prefer to read it before you run it?

Sensible. Nothing here should be run on trust. The installer, the run wrapper, the watchdog and the uninstaller are all plain shell and readable end to end. Download the installer, read it, then run bash install-btx-keeper.sh. It fetches the other three from this site, or uses them straight from disk if you saved them alongside it.

Uninstall

~/.btx-keeper/uninstall.sh

Everything, gone, one command.

Safety, plainly

No keys, ever. The node runs with the wallet switched off, and the source fallback does not even compile the wallet code in.
Its control interface listens on your machine only.
Chain identity is anchored to a published, checksummed snapshot; the node follows the network's signed confirmations. You are trusting the network's signing key for that one check, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Prefer clicking to typing?

The easyNode for BTX app has Keeper mode built in on Mac, from version 0.6.8 onwards: install the app, flip one switch in Settings, done. Same engine, same service, with a window and a menu-bar icon. The command-line installer on this page is the expert path, the app is the easy one.

On Linux, Keeper mode is the profile switch inside easyNode, from 0.6.11. The standalone installer above is macOS only. A Linux machine can also serve confirmations by running a BTX node configured by hand.

How many machines actually serve confirmations, and how many only claim to, is counted on the node census. Members of the node circle see the per-node Archive column, which separates advertising from serve-verified.

Running a node that isn't ours?

The BTX Node Guardian is the same stall logic that runs inside the Keeper, packaged as a standalone script for any BTX node: a pool, an explorer, a mining node. Free, readable end to end, and it never restarts your node.