With Ethereum becoming increasingly more difficult to mine, and with ETH 2.0 just around the corner/a long way off, miners are looking for their next place to dig.
Enter, Ravencoin (RVN). Easily mineable on anything from a GTX 1050Ti upwards, and with a 3070 able to generate just shy of 50 coins a day. That's a potential tidy profit of $3.49 vs Ethereums $3.67. And, who doesn't like having more coins in their wallet. Plus, 50 coins a day is what you used to be able to mine from Bitcoin back in the day.
Why run a node?
Nodes are what help the network verify transactions on the blockchain, and you get to be a part of this amazing blockchain. They keep things secure and help speed things up. Best of all, if you're machine is already running while mining then the impact to you is next to zero, just a little bit of disk space.
Lets get started
Step 1 - Download Ravencore
Just visit https://github.com/RavenProject/Ravencoin/releases/download/v4.3.2.1/raven-4.3.2.1-win64-setup-signed.exe to grab yourself the signed, windows installer and get that installed on your computer.
Step 2 - Run Ravencore
Run the newly installed Ravencore app 
You will now see that it is Syncing Headers 
Just let this run. The time it takes will depend on your bandwidth but should only take a few hours.
Step 3 - Configure Ravencore
Now we must allow incoming connections. Don't worry, its perfectly secure.
Click on Wallet in the menu and select Options
Click on Network and enable Map port using UPnP. If you prefer to map ports yourself you will need to map port 8767 to your machine.
Step 4
That's it, you have just configured a ravencoin node. Eventually you will find yourself in the list on ravennodes.com as you play your part and strenghten the network.
Verify everything is working
From the main page just check that you have some incoming connections. This will take around 15 minutes before you start seeing some In connections.
Conclusion
Download, run, enable connections and that's it. You now run a node on the Ravencoin blockchain. You are part of what makes this whole crypto world great.
