Bitcoin Forum

Hello forum

After studying the paper from Pustogarov "Bitcoin over TOR isn't a good idea" I am wondering
if direct connecting to my own fullnode would be a better alternative in therms of anonymity
than making Bitcoin-transactions over Tor?


Thank's for every feedback!

Joe



PS
Does it makes a difference if I have connected my wallet-app to my own fullnode or if the wallet
selects the fullnode randomly?

Paper is from 7 years ago. The paper highlights the risk of sybil attack over Tor and poisoning by exit nodes which isn't possible if you're only use onion nodes which doesn't route the traffic through exit nodes. I'm not sure why people keeps on citing it.
What wallet are you using? It would be far better for you to do a single connection to your full node if you're using an SPV wallet. Most SPV wallets are not great at preserving privacy. If your wallet is using bloom filters, you need to configure your node for it as well.

The attack method described in that paper requires enormous numbers of IP addresses in the thousands range, no way somebody would blow thousands of dollars a month on those when he could just buy the equivalent amount of bitcoin (the same goes for criminal groups), only a state agency would be interested in that sort of thing. And I imagine they scoff and look down on both Bitcoin & Tor anyway and do not have a programme for doing that, and besides governments usually have a policy for using only certain IP blocks for national security reasons so it should be relatively easy to detect nodes with those IPs.

This also requires agencies to run hundreds of Tor exit nodes, on their networks due to national security requirements, potentially exposing the networks to attack by a sufficiently motivated rival agency - a case more likely to happen than an attack on the Bitcoin Network's Tor connections.


No not at all. Even with this flaw (which hasn't been successfully exploited to date), Tor is more anonymous than using a direct connection.


Usually your own is better but please tell us which wallet you're using.

Thank you very much for the good answers!


I am really a beginner and tried a few wallets (Mycellium, BRD) but need something different. Maybe can give me an advice and if possible you can share your
must-have wallet-features as well :)

Ok, the following features seems important to me:


- offline Seed-creation!

- have the wallet connected to a dedicated fullnode (don't know yet if  using VPN, Tor or proxy)

- adress-book (in order to know to whom I sent my Bitcoin)

- easy sharing the QR-Code of Bitcoin-addresses. Make a new-email and add the   attachment?
  Not very comfortable.. I realldy don't know how profs are doing that..


- Wallet should inform the user upon the availabilitiy of new versions,  e.g. by push-message
  (without silently installing new version w/o notifiying  the user)

- available for Android

- if possible open source and available on FDroid

- Hardware-wallet suport

You are looking for Electrum. (website (https://electrum.org)  forum board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0))

It supports all the features you mentioned and also has an Android version on the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.electrum.electrum&hl=en&gl=US