I've read that you should NOT directly look on mempool.space, in order to check specific transactions.
Should you do this, instead, on Tor? And how to find the onion address of mempool.space, in order to do this?
When you use Tor hidden services:
  • Tor is slow
  • Your ISP knows you are using Tor
  • Mempool.space does not know your IP address
  • Mempool.space knows what was searched and when it was searched and that it was searched from their Tor hidden service
When you use mempool's open source explorer from your own node:
  • Very fast on LAN + easy to setup your own Tor Hidden service
  • Your ISP (probably) knows you run a Bitcion node
  • You are invisible to Mempool.space completely
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Thanks for this.
In general, how do you find onion addresses?
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153 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 6 May
Privacy-aware websites include this HTTP header:
Onion-Location: http://mempoolhqx4isw62xs7abwphsq7ldayuidyx2v2oethdhhj6mlo2r6ad.onion/
Privacy-aware web browsers will acknowledge this header and add this to the URL bar when you visit the site on clearnet.
Click the "purple" button to enter The Onion.
Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser, Brave Browser, etc.
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Aha! Thanks, I think I may have occasionally seen that out of the corner of my eye, but never really noticed it.
So that's how people are finding onion addresses!
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You should run your own mempool.space that references your own node for data
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Better to self host block explorer, but if need to use something public like mempool.space or blockstream.info, definitely use Tor.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @windward 6 May
Run your own node and you'll never need to ask mempool.space for anything ever again.
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It depends really...if you opt in to all the saga of ordinals disrespector and the datacarriersize=0 saga you are not very well off with your own mempool for fee forecasting. In such situation, mempool.space fee forecasts are more realistic because of their non-biased mempool policy.
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Yes, linking your IP address with transactions has no upsides, only downsides
Buuut, in reality probably nobody ever saved what you looked up.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 6 May
I just use the tor browser
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get umbrel or start9, run your own node, run your own mempool 🤙