Bitcoin Forum

Default Electrum wallet does not connect to Onion server and Tor connection. I want to have more privacy and want to use Tor with Electrum.

In Electrum wallet's Document, they wrote that there are two ways to do that.

https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tor.html

Can I connect my Electrum wallet to more than one server but not normal server but with Onion?

Can I connect my Electrum wallet to 8 Onion servers to get block headers and transaction information and use one Onion service for my transaction?

You could use the public known tor project nodes by BitcoinFX long term forum users and trusted privacy advocate.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5177001.0

There was a PR attempt in GitHub that wasn't merged: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/pull/2191 (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/pull/2191)
Click the link to the issue (#2160 (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/2160)) to see the discussion.

Some Devs argued that connecting exclusively to onion servers wont provide you extra privacy, the selected main onion server is good enough.
There's no explanation but maybe it's because your Electrum client will only sync with the server that you've selected, the "Connected nodes" are only for verification purposes.

If you manually select an onion node, your Electrum client will only connect to that one node and no other. If that server went offline, Electrum wouldn't automatically pick a random "normal server" to connect to. OP needs to ensure he unticks the "Select server automatically" option as well. So, if your main onion node goes offline, you go offline as well and you have no connection. In that case, OP needs to find a different onion node to connect to without touching clearnet nodes.

Electrum cannot connect to Bitcoin full node though and BitcoinFX doesn't seem to run his own Electrum server.


OP could just use list of server which used by Electrum which include some onion node[1]. Alternatively there are website which list Electrum server[2], although you have to trust both website and owner of the Electrum server.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/servers.json (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/electrum/servers.json)
[2] https://1209k.com/bitcoin-eye/ele.php (https://1209k.com/bitcoin-eye/ele.php)

Thanks for the sources. The GitHub source contains 14 onion nodes, while the one on 1209k.com lists a total of 31 servers. Some of the ones from Electrum's GitHub appear in the second source as well, but not all of them. It's a good compilation with 40-50 onion nodes to pick from.

Trust is a difficult concept. Unless you know the person or party running a server, it's impossible to know their motives and reasons why they created their node.

To pick?

Do you have reason why you pick one onion node and ignore others?

Could you share how you pick an onion node, please?

Do you only pick one randomly from the list of 40 or 50 onion nodes?

He's aiming for the "Multiple server" option in the tutorial that removes the "-1" arg which will enable Electrum to connect to other nodes (servers).
Manual selection in the GUI is basically the same as that since there's no checkbox or menu that will enable "oneserver".
Notice that in the 'Network' settings, there are "Connected nodes" below, that's what the 'multiple servers' is about.

But as mentioned, even if connecting exclusively to onion servers is implemented, it'll not improve his privacy even further.

Additionally, using oneserver while connecting to other people's server is not as secure as using the multiple servers option.

Do you use a VPN?? maybe you should.