Howdy y'all.
I recently decided to recommission a spare desktop as an Electrum server, and I'm curious about some of the settings in my bitcoin.conf file. My goal is to make this server as secure and anonymous as possible. I have firewalls on my modem, my router, and I've enable ufw as well. I've opened port 8333 so I can have inbound connection to core, but I haven't opened up the port for RPC (If I do it will be for local network devices only.) I don't plan to use this node as a wallet, so I've disabled those features.
My question is specifically about my anonymity and the proxy settings. Currently I have the following settings in my bitcoin.conf file:
# Connect via a SOCKS5 proxy
proxy=127.0.0.1:9050
# Automatically create Tor hidden service.
listenonion=1
# Randomize credentials for every proxy connection. This enables Tor stream isolation.
proxyrandomize=0
At one point I had
proxyrandomize=1 in the setting to turn on that feature, but I noticed that connections to peers was inconsistent, slow, and hard to obtain. Is this feature worth using? I can only imagine that it would help with anonymity, but I guess I'm not sure what it really does. Can anyone help explain things to me a bit clearer?
Server configuration:
Intell I5 processor, 4GB ram
Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3.8
Bitcoin Core Version 0.20.0
This is my first attempt to run a node as a server, so please share any information that you feel might be helpful. Thank you.
