Guess what? The day has finally come to pull back the curtain on what we’ve been working so hard on for the past several months — umbrelOS 1.0.

For a first look at what we’ve built, be sure to watch the umbrelOS 1.0 reveal video.

This isn’t just another version; it’s a ground-up rebuild, a rebirth of our vision for the ultimate personal server and home cloud OS.

umbrelOS 1.0 will be rolling out on March 18, 2024, both as a fresh install and as a software update for our Umbrel Home and Raspberry Pi users. And in April 2024, for our Ubuntu and Debian users running umbrelOS 0.5.

The story

Let’s first set the stage for those meeting Umbrel for the first time. At its core, umbrelOS empowers you to run a personal home cloud.

It’s designed for simplicity: you can install it for free on hardware like a Raspberry Pi, or opt for a plug-and-play solution with the Umbrel Home.

Once set up, you can access umbrelOS through a web browser on any device connected to the same network.

And with just a click, you can deploy apps like Nextcloud for file storage, run a Bitcoin node, and much more. More than convenience, umbrelOS is about the ownership of your data, and your privacy.

The backstory

When we started working on umbrelOS in 2020, we were fueled by a simple yet profound belief: your data should belong to you, not some distant “cloud” computer.

But as we grew, we realized our ambition was outpacing our foundation. umbrelOS’s initial architecture, once an MVP to validate our hypothesis, started to creak under the weight of its own potential.

So, we faced a crossroads: continue adding features atop a fragile architecture, or rebuild our dreams with the stability, user experience, and security you deserve.

We chose the latter.

Under the hood

At the heart of umbrelOS 1.0 lies a complete architectural overhaul. We’ve re-written the backbone of the system, combining system services, APIs, and the user interface into a singular, streamlined service.

This unified architecture not only speeds up pretty much every single aspect of your experience, such as boot times and app installations, but significantly simplifies the underlying complexity by removing multiple complex, moving parts — ultimately making umbrelOS more reliable and stable than ever.

An interface that feels like tomorrow

Design is at the heart of Umbrel. We’ve always believed that functionality and beauty should go hand in hand. With umbrelOS 1.0, we’re infusing this philosophy into every tap and click.

By embracing glassmorphism, we’ve crafted an environment where elements boast a light, see-through quality, and windows blur the background to achieve that dreamy depth.

Every component is meticulously placed with a keen awareness of its visual hierarchy on the Z-axis and its surroundings.

Every element, from the dock icons and windows to confirmation dialogues, notifications, and overlays, has been hand-crafted for elegance and ease.

On mobile, this philosophy extends to swipeable drawers, offering a fluid, intuitive navigation that transitions the complexity of a multi-level layout into pure simplicity and delight.

Widgets: Your home screen, your way

The home screen should not just be a part of the OS; it should be a reflection of you.

Whether it’s keeping an eye on your device’s storage or catching up with your Bitcoin node, or even your torrent downloads, you can now customize it with widgets that speak to you.

And with our Widgets API, developers can create widgets that bring even more life and functionality to your Umbrel.

⌘K: Everything at your fingertips

Hit Command-K (⌘K) on Mac or Control-K (Ctrl + K) on Windows, and suddenly, the entirety of umbrelOS is at your fingertips. Search for system settings, find apps, or initiate actions — just like that.

Quick actions: Right-click away

In the spirit of making things simpler, quick actions allow you to interact with your apps and umbrelOS in a much faster way.

Need to restart an app? It’s just a right-click away. Want to change the wallpaper? You guessed it — also a right-click away.

7 new languages

umbrelOS is now fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Italian, and Dutch. Expect more languages in future updates. Because your OS should understand you, not the other way around.

Live Usage

Keep your finger on the pulse of your device’s performance. RAM, storage, CPU — track it all in real-time, with a detailed breakdown by app.

Factory Reset

Need to start from a clean slate? The new factory reset feature ensures you can do so easily and securely, wiping all your data and apps to reset your Umbrel to its original state.

The upgraded Umbrel Home

Umbrel Home is the ultimate plug-and-play home cloud, powered by umbrelOS. And we’re excited to introduce the new, upgraded Umbrel Home, which is shipping worldwide starting today!

Turbocharged with an Intel N100 CPU, the new Umbrel Home is a beast.

It’s 2x faster than a Raspberry Pi 5, and 5x faster than a Raspberry Pi 4. Oh, and it also has a much faster 16GB DDR5 RAM, as well as a faster 2TB SSD than the previous version.

Thanks to your support and the incredible demand, we’ve been able to scale up our manufacturing. The best part?

We’re now able to bring you the Umbrel Home at a price that’s much more accessible than ever — just $399 in the US & worldwide, €369 in the EU, and £319 in the UK.

Learn more or order yours on our website.

The road ahead

umbrelOS 1.0 is by all means a new beginning. Our goal with this release was to achieve feature parity with umbrelOS 0.5, and lay out a solid foundation for what’s next.

Speaking about what’s next — it’s everything you’ve been dreaming of. https, backups, domain names and more are coming in a subsequent release of umbrelOS after 1.0.

Your role

This isn’t just our journey; it’s equally yours too. Whether you’re updating your existing setup or diving into self-hosting for the first time, we’re here, ready to welcome you into the fold.

Join our Discord or our community forum, share your stories, and become part of a community that’s reshaping the internet, one personal server at a time.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for believing in this dream, for pushing us to strive for greatness, and for being the soul of Umbrel. We can’t wait for you to experience umbrelOS 1.0 and the new Umbrel Home.

Let’s make magic happen.

With all the excitement and gratitude — until next time.

Introducing umbrelOS 1.0: A Leap Into The Future of Home Cloud OS was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re beyond excited to reveal what we’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Before I say more, here’s a short video.

This is Umbrel 0.5. A beautiful personal server OS that makes self-hosting accessible for everyone. And our biggest update to Umbrel yet.

Umbrel 0.5 is now live. If you’re running Umbrel, just log in to update.

New UI

Umbrel 0.5 brings the very first redesign of Umbrel’s UI since we launched. We went back to the drawing board to design a completely new homepage, a refreshed UI with beautifully crafted glass-like elements, a new dock-based layout, and the option to pick and choose from one of the 16 gorgeous, hand-curated wallpapers. And, of course, there’s a dark mode (finally!).

Simple one-line install

Installing Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 remains the most popular choice because of its simplicity. But due to the ongoing global Raspberry Pi shortage, we’ve received many requests from the community to make non-Raspberry Pi installation easier.

You can now install Umbrel on any hardware that is running Ubuntu or Debian — including any single-board computer (like a RockPro, ODROID, etc.), NUC, laptop/computer, VM, or even a cloud instance (if it makes sense for your use case).

Just run this one-line command in Terminal to get up and running:

curl -L https://umbrel.sh | bash

Realtime app updates

Until now, app updates have been bundled together with Umbrel updates. With Umbrel 0.5, app updates are available as soon as developers publish them on our app store, bringing you the latest features and bug fixes on the fly without waiting for an Umbrel update.

New Bitcoin Node and Lightning Node apps

Last year, with Umbrel 0.4, we announced our plan to build a general-purpose OS for self-hosting and migrate the Bitcoin and Lightning nodes (installed by default on Umbrel until now) to the Umbrel App Store.

Today, that migration is finally complete.

Updating an existing Umbrel to 0.5 will automatically migrate your Bitcoin and Lightning data to our new, official Bitcoin Node and Lightning Node apps.

And if you’re setting up a new Umbrel, you’ll start from a clean slate.

Moving Bitcoin to the Umbrel App Store also massively reduces the reliance on us to call the shots on behalf of our users in case of a Bitcoin network fork situation. Like all the other apps, the new Bitcoin Node app will now receive its updates independently from the Umbrel updates. We also encourage multiple Bitcoin and Lightning implementations maintained by different developers in our app store to provide more choices.

On that note, Core Lightning (previously c-lightning), a Lightning node implementation by Elements, is now live on the Umbrel App Store.

App permissions and dependencies

Apps can now plug into other apps for data, and before an app is installed, you’ll be able to see which other apps an app requires access to.

When you try to uninstall an app that is being used by other apps, you’ll be promptly notified.

Authentication for apps

If you’re logged into your Umbrel and you open an app, you can directly access the app, like you can today. But if you’re logged out of your Umbrel and you try to open an app directly (by visiting its URL), there’s a new layer of authentication powered by your Umbrel password.

This also means that if you have 2FA enabled on your Umbrel, your apps are also now protected by 2FA, just like that.

It’s also a one less thing to worry about for app developers. They no longer need to build authentication into their apps, knowing that their app will automatically be safeguarded behind Umbrel’s authentication.

Note: this feature is currently supported by most, but not all, apps. We’re working with app developers to help them seamlessly add support for it to their applications.

A new way to package and ship apps for Umbrel

This release has brought massive underlying architectural changes to Umbrel’s source code. One of those changes is the migration of the Umbrel App Store to its own dedicated GitHub repository, along with a new way to easily test, package and ship apps for Umbrel.

If you’re a developer interested in learning more, here’s a one-page doc that goes over it.

I’m just so excited and relieved that we can finally share all the new stuff we’ve been working on. Umbrel 0.5 marks the first release of Umbrel as a general-purpose personal server OS, so we’re very much at the early stage of development. There’s a lot coming up.

We wouldn’t be here without the love and support from you — our users and our community. We can’t wait for you to try out the new update and see all the cool things you do with it.

Until next time.

Introducing Umbrel 0.5 — A beautiful personal server OS for self-hosting was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It all feels like a dream when we look back on our journey over the last year. From an idea to a prototype to a real product with an amazing community and thousands of users all over the world — it’s been a crazy and humbling ride.

Umbrel servers are powering 90% of all the Lightning Network nodes launched over the last year. What’s more exciting is the fact that the world’s most open, fair, and decentralized monetary network isn’t powered by AWS but by “average people” running Bitcoin and Lightning nodes in their homes. People are voting with their feet by participating directly at the protocol layer and not just the application layer, bypassing all intermediaries.

As Umbrel evolves from a Bitcoin and Lightning Network node to a personal server, our mission has never felt more urgent. Surveillance capitalism has plagued the internet, and self-hosting your data on your personal server is the only way to ensure that your data won’t be used against you. Because you never hand it out in the first place.

Today, over 13,000 people are running their personal servers in their homes using Umbrel. Instead of relying on Big Tech, people are taking complete control of their digital lives by self-hosting apps like Nextcloud for file storage, Matrix for messaging, PhotoPrism for media, and more, all on their Umbrel.

The personal computer revolution shifted computing from rooms full of computers (mainframes) owned by corporations to personal computers owned by regular people in their homes. The personal server revolution is shifting computing from rooms full of servers (data centers) owned by corporations to personal servers owned by regular people in their homes.

Over this decade, personal servers will become as ubiquitous as the internet routers today. Our goal is to power this shift by making an incredibly simple yet powerful operating system for running them, and partnering with hardware companies like The Bitcoin Machines to offer plug-and-play Umbrel servers.

Which is why I’m excited to announce that Umbrel has raised $3M in a seed round from an amazing group of investors to help us grow our team and accelerate our development.

This oversubscribed round was led by OSS Capital, with participation from Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Slow Ventures, Andreas Antonopoulos, Owen Gunden, Max Webster, Stephen Cole, Fulgur Ventures, Mimesis Capital, Huat Ventures, and several other notable investors, in addition to Village Global.

How it all began

Back in 2019, I decided to run a Bitcoin node on my Raspberry Pi computer. I was already running a Bitcoin node on someone else’s computer (aka the “cloud”) but wanted to take my self-sovereignty to the next level.

mayank chhabra ☂️ on Twitter: "Time to get my Bitcoin full node off from someone else's computer (aka cloud) to self-owned dedicated hardware.- Raspberry Pi 4 - 4GB RAM- 480GB Kingston A400 SSD- 2.5" SSD Enclosure (SATA to USB 3.0)- Acrylic Case- 5V Fan- Aluminum Heatsinks- Ethernet Cable- 15W Supply pic.twitter.com/Ri44AIFu0c / Twitter"

Time to get my Bitcoin full node off from someone else's computer (aka cloud) to self-owned dedicated hardware.- Raspberry Pi 4 - 4GB RAM- 480GB Kingston A400 SSD- 2.5" SSD Enclosure (SATA to USB 3.0)- Acrylic Case- 5V Fan- Aluminum Heatsinks- Ethernet Cable- 15W Supply pic.twitter.com/Ri44AIFu0c

Once it was up and running, things were never the same. There was an indescribable sense of freedom in self-hosting the Bitcoin blockchain locally and interacting with the network without any third party.

Like a child in a candy shop, I wanted to run everything on my node — a Lightning Network node, a blockchain explorer, an Electrum server. And why stop at just Bitcoin apps? Bitcoin became my gateway drug to the world of self-hosting. Soon, the idea of owning all of my data locally and reducing my reliance on third-party services took over me.

What I was trying to build wasn’t just a Bitcoin node anymore. It was a personal server that could help me de-cloud. I knew just enough of the command line to get my way around. So I looked around for a personal server OS with a GUI that could do it all but found nothing.

My head started racing. I couldn’t sleep. It felt like discovering a hidden secret in plain sight. An opportunity to empower regular, non-technical people to run their personal servers.

I jumped into Figma and quickly designed an early UI prototype of what this OS would look like, focusing only on Bitcoin-related use cases to begin with, and presented it at a small Bitcoin and Lightning meetup in Chiang Mai.

Luke was one of the attendees. We had met a few days before at a Christmas eve party for the first time. He had moved to Thailand from the UK in 2016 to cut down on his living costs to work full-time on his 100+ open source projects.

A few months later, Luke joined me in this journey as my cofounder and Umbrel’s CTO.

I got lucky to have met him right before the pandemic and lockdowns began. Building Umbrel along with Luke has been such a rewarding experience, and looking back, he’s the best cofounder that I could have asked for.

We were building Umbrel because we wanted to use Umbrel ourselves and there was nothing like it. We were our own users from day one, so we kept going, self-funding the development of Umbrel from our savings until recently. Turns out that magic happens if you really believe in something and give it your everything.

We’re hiring

Rebuilding the third generation of the internet from the ground up with first principles is no small task. It’s challenging, but fulfilling. Our most important work lies ahead of us, and you can be a part of it.

We’re hiring across all roles — design, development, marketing, business, operations, community, and support. You can be among the first ten people to join Umbrel, and your work will have a direct impact on shaping Umbrel’s future.

What we care about: talent with a genuine love for your craft and the desire to do meaningful work. What we don’t care about: credentials and degrees.

When you really love what you do, work feels like play. And when work feels like play, you become the best at it. That’s what we’re looking for. If it sounds like you, and our mission resonates with you, email us at jobs@getumbrel.com.

From starting Umbrel to building the product to fundraising, we’ve done it all remotely, and we don’t plan to change it. Our headquarters are on the internet. So you can be based anywhere geographically, from Bay Area to Bangladesh, wherever you feel the most alive.

Thank you

Fundraising is a gratifying signal that we’re on the right track — but it’s a means to an end, not an end itself. The only thing that really matters is building something that people love.

So I want to thank all of our users for believing in us and giving us feedback to improve Umbrel constantly, our amazing community that has contributed code, bug fixes, documentation and more than we can ever return, and our investors for trusting us and helping us make our vision a reality.

Umbrel is an unfinished painting — far from it. We have so much coming up, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.

Until next time,
Mayank

Umbrel raises $3M in seed round to get a server in every home was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, with the release of Umbrel v0.4, we’re taking a leap in making digital self-sovereignty accessible to the masses. We’re also excited to announce that over the coming days, Umbrel’s source code will be relicensed to a new license — PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0, which is much more permissive and suitable than our current license.

TL;DR — if you don’t intend to sell Umbrel, our new license grants you the same freedoms that come with an open source license.

• Umbrel’s source code will remain public on GitHub, as it always has been.
• Anyone can freely use, fork, modify or distribute modifications of source code for personal and nonprofit purposes.
• Commercial purposes like selling plug-and-play hardware with Umbrel or its derivates, etc continue to be prohibited.
• We’ll continue to publish developer tools (Dosh, umbrel-dev), libraries, and code packages under permissive open source licenses like MIT.

The Story

Law follows technology, and naturally, the evolution of licensing has followed the evolution of open source software. To fully grasp the triggers, motivations, and implications of our new license, it helps to first understand how we got here.

1980s: The Free Software Era

The “free software” movement began in the 1980s when UNIX, the most popular OS at the time, ended up being privatized by AT&T.

The developer community wasn’t particularly happy about it, and a few of the developers got together to start the GNU project with the goal to create an OS that granted users the freedom to view, use, distribute and modify the source code however they liked.

The project soon developed into a movement based on the ideology that all software must be free — free as in free speech, not free as in free beer, and this ideology gave birth to the GPL License.

Free software released under copyleft licenses like GPL requires any modifications or derivative works to be also released as free software under the same license, preventing its use in proprietary software.

2000s: The Open Source Era

The term “open source” was coined by a group of people from the free software movement who wanted to free themselves from its ideology.

Permissive licenses like MIT and Apache, which have no requirements to publish modifications or derivative works under the same license, gained strong momentum, and especially with businesses since they could use open source software to build proprietary software with no obligations.

Unlike the free software movement, developers mostly focused on the practicality of creating and using software instead of the free software ideology. Case in point — GitHub, a proprietary closed source platform owned by Microsoft, built around the open source version control tool Git, is the biggest social network of open source developers today.

Permissive licenses like MIT have pretty much become the standard for all indie developer projects on GitHub, and tools like npm that allow hyper-efficient reuse of code packages contributed to their popularity too by using them as default licenses for new packages.

The open source movement gave birth to a new wave of open source companies with most monetization models being support or “open core”, and it allowed all market participants to benefit from it. But it has also been its own Achilles’ heel.

2020s: The Source Available Era

As cloud infrastructure providers like AWS gained popularity in the last decade, they started offering hosted deployments of open source projects like Redis, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch, often re-branding them, making billions of dollars in hosting fees, and hardly contributed anything back.

Most of the companies behind these open source projects offered their own hosting services and found it impossible to compete with cloud providers like AWS, who were using their software for free. This behavior wasn’t illegal under the permissive open source licenses, and there were no existing licenses that could stop it. Then in 2018, Newton’s third law of physics kicked off a domino effect of relicensing efforts.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

Salil Deshpande spearheaded the creation of Commons Clause — a simple plain-language clause drafted by respected open source lawyer Heather Meeker, that prohibits the selling of software, and can be added to any existing open source project’s license.

“Commons Clause is reviving the original ethos of open source. Academics, hobbyists or developers wishing to use a popular open-source project to power a component of their application can still do so. But if you want to take substantially the same software that someone else has built, and offer it as a service, for your own profit, that’s not in the spirit of the open-source community.” — Salil Deshpande

Some projects like n8n adopted the Commons Clause, while others like MongoDB, Bitwarden, Redis, Onivim and Elastic, wrote their own licenses. The general goal of all of these new licenses was to essentially stop predatory behaviour and exploitation, and promote fair code usage.

Such predatory behaviour isn’t unique to specific kinds of open source projects. Luke, my cofounder, has published over 100 open source projects, all permissively licensed under MIT, before we started working on Umbrel. In 2016, he moved to Thailand from the UK to cut down his living costs so he could afford to work full-time on open source.

His packages have received 10 billion+ downloads and are used by companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and thousands more. Luke has single-handedly created massive economic value for all of these companies — probably in the millions of dollars, possibly in the billions — yet none of them contributed anything back.

The PolyForm Project

Musicians, artists, filmmakers, writers have all had standardized noncommercial license choices thanks to Creative Commons. Even though the Creative Commons licenses are not recommended for software, due to lack of standardized source available licenses, many software projects like us, Highcharts JS, myNode, ended up using them.

Enter the PolyForm Project. In 2019, a group of respected open source lawyers got together to publish simple, standardized, plain-language, and approachable source available software licenses with the goal to fulfill the long-standing demands of developers.

The future of open source

This transition of new and existing open source projects to source available licenses indicates the start of a new era, but it doesn’t indicate the end of open source and free software eras. Instead, all three kinds of licensing models will continue to coexist, and developers will get to enjoy more freedom and flexibility in deciding how their work is used.

For software that needs additional layers of software to be built on top of it (eg. Bitcoin Core, LND, Boostrap, VueJS), it makes sense for it to be freely licensed under permissive licenses like MIT.

But for most consumer products, companies can now publicly publish their source code without worrying about predatory behavior. This is especially great news for makers of high-stakes software where having the source code public is critical for security, like Bitcoin wallets, many of whom have already started to adopt source available licenses (Coldcard, Lily Wallet).

By OSI’s 30-year old definition of “open source”, this new family of licenses are not open source since they impose some form of noncommercial restrictions, but it doesn’t mean they’re closed source or proprietary — “openness” is a spectrum.

Our new license grants nearly all freedoms that come with an open source license to our users, such as the ability to view, modify and redistribute the source code, while the noncommercial restriction allows us to build a path to sustainably fund the development of Umbrel in the long-term by exploring partnerships with plug-and-play hardware vendors, and such.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to release developer tools like Dosh — a handy command-line tool that drops you into a temporary Docker container’s shell with host filesystem access, along with reusable libraries and packages that we develop in-house, under permissive open source licenses.

I can’t end this post without taking a moment to thank Heather Meeker. Heather is an incredibly talented open source lawyer who led the drafting of the Commons Clause, MongoDB’s SSPL, Elastic’s ELv2, and is also on the team of the PolyForm Project. Our conversations with Heather have been deeply insightful, and her work has played a key role in helping shape our perspective. I encourage everyone to read her post on the Elastic License 2.0 and the Evolution of Open Source Licensing, a lot of which has inspired the foundation of this post.

Everything you need to know about Umbrel’s new license was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Six months ago when we introduced the Umbrel App Store, we said “this isn’t just about Bitcoin anymore — it’s a paradigm shift in computing”. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our next step in powering this shift.

Starting today, Umbrel isn’t just a Bitcoin and Lightning node. It’s a personal server OS that empowers anyone to reclaim full ownership and control of their data, and become a truly self-sovereign citizen of the internet.

With 10 brand new apps in the Umbrel App Store, you can now run your own personal cloud with Nextcloud, host your photos and videos with PhotoPrism, passwords with Vaultwarden, code repositories with Gitea, block ads on your entire network with Pi-hole, automate your home with Home Assistant, run your own messaging server with Matrix, stream torrents with SimpleTorrent, and even code in VS Code on your Umbrel with code-server.

You can also now view your storage and RAM usage with complete app-by-app breakdown, along with your CPU temperature and uptime in the settings.

We’re also happy to announce that over the coming days, Umbrel’s source code will be relicensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0 license, a much more permissive license than our current one.

Licensing is a nuanced subject, so we’ve written a dedicated post that describes this change, its implications, and the evolution of open source licensing. TL;DR — if you don’t intend to sell Umbrel, our new license grants you the same freedoms that come with an open source license.

What’s a personal server?

A server is basically a computer that runs 24x7 to provide services to other computers called “clients”. If you use Gmail, your emails are stored on Google’s servers, and the Gmail app on your phone (or the Gmail website) is the client.

All our interactions on the internet today are mediated by a few companies who offer “free” services in exchange for storing our data on their servers to spy on us. We’re only allowed to do things that their servers will let us do, and we never really have ownership of our data, they do. Hence the quote — “there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer”.

Until now, running a personal server and self-hosting has mostly been popular among computer geeks and nerds, much like personal computing in the 80s, and for pretty much the same reason — a high level of technical skills required combined with the high price of server hardware.

Thanks to the recent advancements in ARM processors and Single-Board Computers, a $55 palm-sized Raspberry Pi 4 today is more than capable to serve as a personal server for an average family — all while consuming electricity that costs about 2 cups of coffee in an entire year.

For the average person looking to break away from big-tech and reclaim their digital sovereignty, the hardware to run a personal server exists today. And now with Umbrel, the software does too.

(Re)building the internet we were promised

Running a personal server inside your home fundamentally changes the entire architecture of the internet today. You, your friends, and your family’s photos, videos, messages, files, notes, passwords — everything, they have nothing to do with someone else’s computer. They’re a part of your private life, and now they can all be stored by you, in your physical custody, on your Umbrel, instead of a random company’s server in Northern Virginia.

In an internet plagued by surveillance capitalism, your Umbrel is your ultimate exit. Grab a Raspberry Pi, toss Umbrel OS on it, connect an external drive, and that’s it — you can now peacefully opt out. You no longer have to stick to their rules, because you no longer play their game.

Because your Umbrel is 24x7 connected to the internet, you can access it, and all the apps on it, from anywhere in the world using a Tor browser, and whatever you do on it can not be monitored by anyone — not Google, not Facebook, not your ISP, and not us.

Every single line of code that runs your Umbrel is public and can be found on our GitHub, and all apps in the Umbrel App Store have their source code public too. So you can literally see everything that happens with your files without taking anyone’s word for it. No more not having a clue about what happens with your data.

Self-hosting apps on your Umbrel fundamentally changes your relationship with the developers of these apps. Because you retain full control over your data, developers can no longer leverage it as a tool to monetize their apps. This better aligns their incentives to build apps that genuinely add value to your life and use direct monetization models, instead of building apps that are optimized to harvest as much of your data as possible.

Bitcoin and Lightning

Bitcoin and Lightning are peer-to-peer networks made up of self-hosted nodes running on servers around the world that are constantly talking to each other, which is why they’re a killer use case for running a personal server.

The ability to independently verify and build the state of the Bitcoin ledger block-by-block, and to participate in the Lightning network without compromises is truly liberating, but it doesn’t end there. Rather, it only marks the beginning of a truly sovereign and user-owned internet.

Currently, Bitcoin Core and LND (Bitcoin and Lightning nodes) are installed by default in Umbrel. Over time, we’ll migrate them to the Umbrel App Store, so your Umbrel would then start from a clean slate and you get to decide what you want to run on it.

This also removes the dependency on us to call the shots on behalf of our users in case of a Bitcoin network fork situation. Bitcoin Core, just like all the other apps, will receive its own updates independently from Umbrel updates. Not only that, but we’ll also encourage multiple Bitcoin and Lightning implementations maintained by different developers in the Umbrel App Store to provide more choices.

Today is a very special day, one that’s been a long time coming. We finally get to share the fruits of a tree that was once nothing but a seed in our heads. It’s been less than a year since we first launched, and looking back, we had no clue how much we’d enjoy this journey of building Umbrel with you all — the community.

If I had to relive the last year all over again, I’d be right here, writing this very post. Thank you for all your love and support, it means the world and we don’t take it for granted one bit.

This is just the beginning of the personal server revolution. The real fun begins now. We’ll talk again soon.

Introducing Umbrel 0.4 — A Personal Server OS for Everyone was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, our friends at Casa are announcing the end of support for the original Casa Node 1 and the Casa Node 2. The Casa Node 1 was the OG of user-friendly plug-and-play Bitcoin and Lightning Network nodes, and was loved by many. Going forward, their node offerings will only receive critical security updates till June 30, 2021.

First the bad news: if you have the original Casa Node 1, you cannot install Umbrel on it because of incompatible hardware. :(

Now the good news: if you have a Casa Node 2, you can continue your journey of being a first-class Bitcoin citizen by running a Bitcoin and Lightning Network node on it using Umbrel, and expand its capabilities with apps in the Umbrel App Store.

Installing Umbrel on the Casa Node 2 is surprisingly simple and takes less than 10 minutes. Let’s get straight into it!

1. First, make sure to close all of your existing Lightning channels and withdraw your funds to a different wallet that you control. Umbrel will create a fresh Lightning wallet and sync the blockchain from scratch.
2. Unplug the power supply and lift the top of your node.

3. Remove the microSD card from the node.

4. Insert the microSD card in your computer. (You might need a card reader to do this. Here’s a good one on Amazon.)

5. Download Umbrel OS on your computer.

6. Download Balena Etcher on your computer.

7. Open Balena Etcher, click “Flash from file” and select the Umbrel OS file that you downloaded in Step 4. Then click “Select target” and select the plugged in microSD card. Finally click “Flash!”.

8. Once Umbrel OS has been flashed on the microSD card, remove the microSD card from your computer and slide it back into its slot in the node.

9. Put the top back in its place, connect the node to your router (if it isn’t already connected), and plug in the power supply to turn it on.

10. And that’s it! After ~10 minutes, your Umbrel will be accessible at http://umbrel.local in a web browser on any device connected to the same network as your node.

If you can’t access umbrel.local, use Angry IP Scanner to find the IP address of your node and type that in the browser instead of “umbrel.local”. If you’re using Windows, try accessing http://umbrel in the browser. Also, if you’re using a VPN, try turning it off.

Need help? Feel free to jump on our Telegram chat or check out these troubleshooting docs put together by the community.

Shoutout to Michael from the Casa team for sharing the product images used in this tutorial!

How to install Umbrel on Casa Node 2 was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One year ago it was a dream. Today, it’s real. We’re so incredibly excited to introduce the Umbrel App Store, which is now available for all Umbrel users as a part of the new Umbrel v0.3.0 update.

The Umbrel App Store is live with seven amazing open-source applications available at launch, and many more coming soon.

Starting this very moment, you can become your own payment processor with BTCPay Server, setup multi-signature custody of your funds with Specter Desktop, run your own blockchain explorer with BTC RPC Explorer, chat over the Lightning Network with Sphinx Relay, loop in and out of Lightning with Lightning Terminal, and manage your funds on the Lightning Network with Ride The Lightning and ThunderHub.

Soon you’ll be able to run your own Lightning Network server for BlueWallet, Dojo server for Samourai Wallet, self-host mempool.space, and partition your Lightning wallet into multiple accounts with LNbits.

Ever since we launched four months ago, people have been continually amazed at how easy it’s become to run your own Bitcoin and Lightning Network node with Umbrel. Grab a Raspberry Pi, toss Umbrel OS on the microSD card, connect an external drive, and boom — you’re ready to use Bitcoin in the most private, trustless, uncensorable, and permissionless way possible.

With the Umbrel App Store, we’re bringing the same experience to third party self-hosted apps that are backed by your own Bitcoin and Lightning node, and can be installed on your Umbrel in one-click with zero configuration.

A unique Tor hidden service (onion address) is generated and configured for every app you install. So when access your Umbrel remotely in a Tor-enabled browser, each app will open up at its onion address.

Developing apps for Umbrel

In addition to the Umbrel App Store, we’re also excited to release the Umbrel App Framework for developers to build, package, test, and submit apps for Umbrel. You are free to use any programming languages, frameworks, and databases to build apps — there’s zero restriction.

Apps run in isolation from each other inside their own virtual environments using Docker. If you already have an app that uses either Bitcoin Core, LND, or Electrum server, it can be packaged for Umbrel in less than an hour.

That is not hyperbole. We only sent out invitations to developers 2 weeks ago, and every single app was submitted in less than 100 lines of code.

The App Store lives inside our source code repository and app submissions are made as pull requests, resulting in a new kind of radically transparent and community-led app submission and review process — one that’s fitting for the open-source revolution.

What just happened?

Let’s take a step back to pause and reflect on what just happened. Your Umbrel, which independently verifies and builds the current state of the Bitcoin ledger block-by-block, all the way from the genesis block to the latest, is now capable of running apps that not only plug into its state but also host all of your data on your Umbrel instead of some company’s server at a data center in Northern Virginia.

These apps live, eat, sleep, and breathe inside your home, along with you, on your Umbrel. You can access them privately from anywhere in the world using a Tor-enabled browser, and your data stored on them never leaves your physical custody.

In other words, your Umbrel is now your own personal server; one that runs Bitcoin, the currency of the internet, natively, and exposes it as an API to third-party apps.

This also solves the problem of “how do you verify that an open-source codebase running on a server isn’t modified?”. The answer is you don’t. You run your own server. This isn’t just about Bitcoin anymore — it’s a paradigm shift in computing.

5 months ago when we teased a screenshot of Umbrel, we never expected the huge outpouring of love and support that we continue to receive from users and the whole community. There is no way we could have shipped updates at this pace if it weren’t for over a dozen other open-source developers, who have not only contributed to our source code, but many of whom also spend countless hours helping out users with support (huge shoutout to Lounès and Aaron!).

I can’t remember the last time I have been this excited about something. Waking up every day and getting to build Umbrel with you all feels nothing less than a privilege, and in Luke’s words — I would pay to continue working on Umbrel.

As always, you can reach me on twitter, telegram, or at mayank@getumbrel.com. Feel free to join our community chat if you have any questions or just want to hang out.

getumbrel.com
twitter.com/getumbrel

Introducing the Umbrel App Store was originally published in Umbrel Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bitcoin is an extension of ourselves, it’s our money — the people’s money. We can choose to transact with whomever, wherever, whenever, and for whatever we want — because Bitcoin does not discriminate.

However, Bitcoin works with an unprecedented level of transparency that most people are not used to dealing with. All Bitcoin transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored in the Bitcoin network. Privacy in Bitcoin is an important (missing) element that gives us the control over who knows what about our identities, our wallets, and our transactions.

Right now, the most significant chunk of transactions happening on the Bitcoin network uses poor privacy practices. Address reuse, exchange linked KYCs, use of custodial wallets, transaction broadcasts to third-party nodes over the open internet, and the list goes on…

A recent survey suggested that about 9 out of 10 people connect to any public wifi available. Key takeaway?

People prefer convenience over safety, and we’ve seen that play out over and over in the past.

In the crypto world, you see that when most of the people have their funds lying in their exchange accounts, and custodial wallets being the most popular; which is no different than keeping your money in a bank (albeit the latter has a more secure history than the former).

Cash is (surprisingly) wonderful when it comes to privacy. A $1 note is a $1 note, no matter if the person who handed it to you had stolen it from someone, or used it to buy weed from the street-peddler. You wouldn’t know that because you cannot trace its history, and even if you somehow figure that out, you will not use special tricks such as shuffling it in a basket of several $1 notes to remove its “taint” and to make it clean.

Strictest privacy settings are applied by default, without any manual input from the end-user, to every $1 note out in the market, making it fungible.

That’s where Wasabi Wallet comes in as a beacon of hope; a rock-solid open-source Bitcoin wallet that implements multiple privacy features on several different layers of interactions with the Bitcoin network, most notably, an in-wallet feature to anonymize your coins by shuffling them with other wallet users in a completely trustless environment (thereby making them “fungible”), and is built by a highly respected and admired team of developers.

It received massive global attention recently when 100 Wasabi users participated in the world’s largest CoinJoin transaction (CoinJoin is a special kind of transaction where several users participate to mix their Bitcoin, essentially privatizing their coins; read more).

Until Bitcoin improves its privacy-preserving techniques via Bitcoin Improvement Proposals or Layer-2 solutions, Wasabi is on the bleeding-edge when it comes to eliminating as many privacy-leaking loopholes that exist in a user’s interaction with the Bitcoin network as possible.

Today it achieves that using features such as address labeling, integrated-Tor, in-built CoinJoins, and such. Tomorrow it could be different — for instance, if Bitcoin implements something like the MimbleWimble protocol down the lane, most of the features that exist in Wasabi today would be useless, and for good.

However, if privacy is a fundamental human right, why isn’t every Bitcoin user using Wasabi right now?

That comes down to the users of Wasabi. As with every technology, the first set of users who adopt it are those who desperately need it. With Wasabi, the first set of users who require such strong privacy-oriented features are those who desperately need to anonymize their footprint on the Bitcoin network (similar to why one of the first user-base on Tor network came for illegal pornography and the Silk Road market).

The second user-base of Wasabi is comprised of people who really care about their privacy and don’t necessarily have “something to hide”. However, this subset of users is technologically literate enough to understand two things in-depth — #1 the need for digital privacy, and #2 privacy shortcomings of the Bitcoin network. As you might have guessed, this subset is really small.

That said, I firmly believe that now is the time to bring the third set of users to Wasabi, which is by far the largest and the most important — the average Bitcoin user, because for the Bitcoin network to truly succeed in its original intention of being “a peer-to-peer electronic CASH system” — as Satoshi titled the Bitcoin whitepaper — privacy-by-default is the only way forward.

And thus, Wasabi as the de-facto Bitcoin wallet, instead of the most private wallet for Bitcoin geeks, has a much brighter future not just for itself, but for the humanity (or at least the crypto-humanity).

So how do we get there?

One can argue that the way to get there would be through education and awareness, shifting the people from the third-set (the average Bitcoin user) to the second-set (those who understand the need of digital privacy and privacy-shortcomings of the Bitcoin network). I don’t disagree with that, and in-fact initiatives such as Wasabi’s new documentation are already doing a stellar job at it!

While the argument itself is correct, education tends to work only if there’s enough curiosity in the subject on an individual level (unless its enforced education like in schools). That’s why your dad is not interested to learn the benefits of using a VPN, and happily uses unencrypted chat applications.

Education alone is not enough.

I believe that confidence in using the Wasabi Wallet application, achieved via user-centric experience design, is the key to bring the third-set of Bitcoin users to Wasabi.

Some common feedback that I (and even Wasabi’s CTO nopara73) have received from several people who’ve tried using Wasabi (mostly from the third-set of users) is many times one of these:

• “Why is it so hard to use?”
• “I don’t understand it”
• “I was scared to use it”
• “I think its easier to just keep my Bitcoin on exchange”

and sometimes even

• “I’m too dumb to figure it out”

With the continuously falling attention-spans, everybody wants to experience the best technology without spending too much of their time and exhausting their busy brains in figuring it out.

The problem gets even worse because unlike non-crypto applications, there is real money involved in Wasabi. For an average Bitcoin user, the downside of not being able to understand the functionality and accidentally doing something wrong far outweighs the upside of him gaining privacy.

“When you combine real with a lack of undo buttons, a lack of password resets, and a lack of central place that fixes all the problems, the risk of something going wrong increases and therefore the user’s confidence decreases”

- Taylor Monahan, CEO MyCrypto (Building Confidence, Not DApps)

As a simple example, consider the following screen of Wasabi Wallet where you need to enter a label to generate a receive address. When I hover on the label input it suggests “Start labeling today and your privacy will thank you tomorrow”.

Which is as true as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, but it fails to educate me, as an average Bitcoin user, on the most important ground — “Why?”

• “Why should I label?”
• “Or what exactly is a label anyway?”
• “I’m confused, what do I need to enter here?”
• “What is it for and how is my privacy impacted?”
• “I never had to put or label anything to generate a receive address in my previous wallet.”
• “How can I find my receive address?”

Now consider the following interface. I can easily understand what a label is, what its purpose is, and how it helps my privacy.

Simple things, but the trail of emotions that follow ultimately ruin my experience and I might not want to consider using Wasabi.

Here is a bit more comprehensive example, along with an emotion-trail, from the CoinJoin screen of Wasabi Wallet:

• “Why is the password I typed in Chinese characters? Am I doing something wrong?” (a real issue!)
• “Target? Anonymity set? What’s that? Am I supposed to click it?”
• “Registration ends in 23 seconds? What’s the registration for? Maybe for a CoinJoin?”
• “88 Registered peers???”
• “0.003% coordinator fee per anonymity set? Who is the coordinator? Does that mean I should select the lowest set for the lowest fees?”
• “Enqueue/Deque selected coins? For what? Are my existing coins queued somewhere? I just want to CoinJoin…”

There is a lot of information on the above interface that expects the user to have a certain level of knowledge, and understand specific terminology before participating in a CoinJoin. Many UI elements can be comfortably removed depending upon the state of the wallet, such as hiding the “Dequeue Selected Coins” button when the user has not queued any coins because thee shalt not deque what thee haven’t queu’d.

Now consider the following (re-imagined) interface. It’s dynamic, conditional and is broken down into three, where the user sees only one of them depending upon his current state of wallet.

The user sees the following interface when he has selected the coins for CoinJoin:

The following interface when he has selected less than the minimum amount of coins required for CoinJoin:

And the following interface when he has already registered the selected coins for CoinJoin:

Practically speaking, you don’t need to think a lot when using a well-designed application, just like you don’t think about every gear-shift or turn when driving your car because it’s highly unlikely that something unexpected would happen. You have full confidence in using it. And when you have full confidence, instead of being confused, scared or frustrated, you just use the app happily to accomplish your desired outcome because everything “just works.”

Everything just works, because everything is well-designed, which doesn’t necessarily mean everything looks beautiful; it means everything works beautifully.

As developers, we always think that we are building the best possible interfaces, which is not wrong. We are building the best possible interfaces, but for whom? Most likely, the users will have way different knowledge and expectation level than us.

That being said, Wasabi has a long way to go before becoming the standard go-to wallet for every Bitcoin user, and I’m excited to be a part of this mission working along with some of the best minds in this space.

This story was also published on HackerNoon.com

The mythical privacy in the age of Bitcoin — and what we’re doing about it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.