Sparrow and privacy - what's reasonable? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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Sparrow and privacy - what's reasonable?

1928 sats \ 8 comments \ @Signal312 18 Nov bitcoin

I'm looking at this info from Sparrow on privacy - https://sparrowwallet.com/docs/best-practices.html.

Basically, it says that if you're at the beginner stage (less than 10k USD), connecting to a public Electrum node is acceptable.

However - if you're running a VPN, wouldn't you be reasonably private, even connecting to a public Electrum, even with a "non-beginner" amount of bitcoin?

Setting up a private bitcoin node seems like a pretty high bar.

Thoughts?

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218 sats \ 5 replies \ @Murch 18 Nov

Many guides focus on installing Bitcoin Core from the source code, but getting the binary directly from the Bitcoin Core website is much easier: https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/

It is also directly packaged for some Linux distributions, e.g. if you are on Ubuntu, you can get it via snap like this:

sudo snap install bitcoin-core

210 sats \ 4 replies \ @Signal312 OP 18 Nov

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not really asking about the best/easiest way to set up a Bitcoin node. What I'd like to know is - without setting up a Bitcoin node, but WITH using Sparrow to manage your own key and transactions (say with Seedsigner) - what are the privacy tradeoffs, for beginning bitcoiners? Would you agree with this: https://sparrowwallet.com/docs/best-practices.html? They basically say that only with smaller amounts should a bitcoiner using sparrow connect to the public electrum servers.

And what about if you're running your own VPN?

Also - wouldn't using a hardware wallet like Ledger to manage your coins be exposing the exact same data that Sparrow does? And using a hardware wallet like Ledger that is what 95% of users do, I would guess (and that's the users that are doing self-custody).

229 sats \ 3 replies \ @Murch 20 Nov

The problem with using an Electrum server is that you leak your entire wallet composition: you literally give the Electrum server the list of addresses you are interested in. It’s that you tell a server that has a high likelihood of being run by surveillants that all your addresses belong to the same wallet which they then can use to tie your wallet to your activity on exchanges and other KYCed businesses.

Regarding the Ledger it depends on the software wallet that you use with the Ledger.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 OP 20 Nov

Also...say you're using something like Blue Wallet on a phone, using it as a hot wallet and making transactions.

What are the privacy implications there - the differences between what a surveillant (interesting new word for me) can capture on Blue Wallet vs. say Sparrow using an public server.

Thanks for your comments.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Signal312 OP 20 Nov

And it doesn't help to use a VPN in this situation?

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @Murch 21 Nov

Using a VPN will help obfuscate your actual IP address, but the information that you are leaking, i.e. which addresses belong your wallet, gets transmitted independently of that to the Electrum server.

125 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 18 Nov

Setting up a private bitcoin node seems like a pretty high bar.

You have more than a year on SN and you still didn't figure it out how to run a damn simple bitcoin node?

FFS is it so hard to download and run it as any other app? https://bitcoincore.org/ How many guides we have to write so you can read them? https://darth-coin.github.io/nodes/bitcoin-ln-node-software-en.html

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 OP 18 Nov

You make a lot of assumptions that are not correct. I'm not asking for myself.