Connecting to your own Bitcoin node

Bisq will connect to your local Bitcoin node if it finds it upon starting up. This article contains the requirements for this to work correctly.

You can also specify the addresses of particular Bitcoin nodes in Settings > Network Info.

General node settings

Make sure the node you're looking to connect to, whether local or remote, meets the following requirements:

• Specify peerbloomfilters=1 in bitcoin.conf file if running 0.19.0.1 or later
• Make sure node is not running in pruned mode (pruned=N in config means node is pruning blocks)

Connecting to a local Bitcoin node

If you're running a Bitcoin full node on the same machine as Bisq, Bisq should connect to your node on startup—it will look for Bitcoin Core or bitcoind running on localhost on port 8333.

Just make sure to not be running any other Bitcoin-based altcoin nodes (like LTC) while starting Bisq.

Connecting to another Bitcoin node

By default, Bisq maximizes your privacy by connecting to nodes run by trusted Bisq contributors.

If you'd like to connect to another node, you can specify its address in Settings > Network Info. Bisq will validate the address and connect to the specified node the next time it starts.

As of this writing, Bisq cannot connect to Bitcoin nodes with Tor v3 addresses.

If you're having issues connecting to a Bitcoin node running 0.21 or later over Tor, consider following the following instructions from the Bitcoin Core release notes to downgrade your node to Tor v2.

The Tor onion service that is automatically created by setting the -listenonion configuration parameter will now be created as a Tor v3 service instead of Tor v2. The private key that was used for Tor v2 (if any) will be left untouched in the onion_private_key file in the data directory (see -datadir) and can be removed if not needed. Bitcoin Core will no longer attempt to read it. The private key for the Tor v3 service will be saved in a file named onion_v3_private_key. To use the deprecated Tor v2 service (not recommended), the onion_private_key can be copied over onion_v3_private_key, e.g. cp -f onion_private_key onion_v3_private_key.

Bisq relies on bitcoinj to interact with Bitcoin nodes, and bitcoinj has not integrated support for Tor v3 addresses yet. We're working with them to do it, however, and will update the community (and this article) when it's ready.