Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I love their initial setup with explanations and easy process for users of choosing connection with bitcoin core node, private electrum node or public server.

OK, that part confused me a little bit since Electrum, for instance, doesn't make you choose a server (although you could if you wanted to).  I didn't play around with the wallet since creating it, so I'm not sure how the bitcoin core node works.  That's the one I selected initially, but it doesn't connect.  When I selected the public server, all was good except I got the warning message "Using a public server means it can see your transactions."

How bad is it that my transactions can be seen on a public server?  

Edit:

Why don’t you run your personal server for electrum. That would be quite handy to keep your things private and secured.

Because I'm a dumbass and haven't learned how to do it and why it's important to do.  You'd think I'd have learned more about the technical aspects of bitcoin by now, but nope.  I pick up dribs and drabs as time goes on.  I didn't even know what a GPU was until about a year ago.

[1714943611]

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[1714943611]

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[1714943611]

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[RapTarX]

with legacy addresses, which you can't do with Electrum anymore, so that's a plus.

I guess you still can use Legacy in Electrum but you need to work with the command line, IIRC. I'm on bed now and with my mobile. I can't check it out to confirm whether it's possible or not but it should be possible I guess. I didn’t like this update personally at all. Legacy must be an option & preference for users.

How bad is it that my transactions can be seen on a public server?  

You are sharing your tx details mean which address belongs to you & whom you are sending BTC. If you aren’t concerned enough about this, I guess no problem at all. Why don’t you run your personal server for electrum. That would be quite handy to keep your things private and secured.

[BlackHatCoiner]

How bad is it that my transactions can be seen on a public server?

Your transactions can been seen by everyone; that's the block chain technology. The scare about needing a public server to know your balance and transact is the case you want to remain anonymous. If the server knew your IP and you demanded to know how much money does 1PharM... have, you could be noted as related with it. Let alone if you sent a signed transaction, which would prove it's you. You could use Tor and avoid this.

The other downside is that in HD wallets, you'll have to send all of those addresses to the server, so it can return you their balances. This is a matter of privacy due to the connection they can make between them even if some have never transacted with each other.

Because I'm a dumbass and haven't learned how to do it and why it's important to do.

Think of this. You own a few bitcoins and transact everyday. You know how Bitcoin works, but you prefer having another party delivering your information. You don't want to verify the blocks which is the whole point of self-dependence. Instead, you trust another doing it for you.

If you sit down and overthink it, you'll realize that you have no idea how much money you have. You're trusting a third party for telling it to you. The whole cash system truly works if you're badass enough to verify it yourself.

Example in real life: You have some cash, but instead of looking up on your packet you let a stranger do that for you. By the assumption he wouldn't be able to steal them from you, would you still feel confident if you allowed that man grabbing your money and paying for your goods?

[Pmalek]

I was able to create a wallet with legacy addresses, which you can't do with Electrum anymore, so that's a plus.

You can, but not in a standard way. You have to first enable the console tab by clicking on 'View' and 'Show Console'. Enter the following code in the console tab:

Code:

make_seed(128,"","standard") 

Electrum will then generate a new 12-word seed for you to write down.

Here is an example of how it looks. For some reason, I had to do it twice because nothing happened the first time.

[DaveF]

Why don’t you run your personal server for electrum. That would be quite handy to keep your things private and secured.

Because I'm a dumbass and haven't learned how to do it and why it's important to do.  You'd think I'd have learned more about the technical aspects of bitcoin by now, but nope.  I pick up dribs and drabs as time goes on.  I didn't even know what a GPU was until about a year ago.

No 'real' knowledge required:
raspiblitz https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz has ElectRS as a 1 click install to setup your own electrum server
mynode https://www.mynodebtc.com/ has one too

RaspberryPi and a 1TB drive and your good.
If you don't want to do that mynode has a virtual machine download so you can run it on your PC using VirtualBox if you want.

Even if it does not work for you for what you want to do it's still a good learning experience.

-Dave

[Dabs]

I love their initial setup with explanations and easy process for users of choosing connection with bitcoin core node, private electrum node or public server.

OK, that part confused me a little bit since Electrum, for instance, doesn't make you choose a server (although you could if you wanted to).  I didn't play around with the wallet since creating it, so I'm not sure how the bitcoin core node works.  That's the one I selected initially, but it doesn't connect.  When I selected the public server, all was good except I got the warning message "Using a public server means it can see your transactions."

How bad is it that my transactions can be seen on a public server?  

Edit:

Why don’t you run your personal server for electrum. That would be quite handy to keep your things private and secured.

Because I'm a dumbass and haven't learned how to do it and why it's important to do.  You'd think I'd have learned more about the technical aspects of bitcoin by now, but nope.  I pick up dribs and drabs as time goes on.  I didn't even know what a GPU was until about a year ago.

It was recently confirmed that Chainalysis runs public servers. Is it bad? We bitcoiners have known that this has always been possible.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5361277.0

[The Sceptical Chymist]

You can, but not in a standard way.

Dude, you rock!!  I was able to create an Electrum wallet with legacy addresses, which I thought was impossible.  Thank you for that.

I'm still liking the Sparrow wallet, by the way.  I don't exactly have a need for another wallet, and I like Electrum a little bit better, but I'm not going to discard it like I have with so many other wallets I've tried (like Exodus, Coinomi, and a bunch of others).

RaspberryPi and a 1TB drive and your good.

I've got the former but not the latter--at least not unoccupied at the moment.  But I appreciate the suggestion very much.

[Pmalek]

I was able to create an Electrum wallet with legacy addresses, which I thought was impossible.  Thank you for that.

No problem, you are welcome. Although, it doesn't make much sense using legacy wallets and addresses nowadays, but I understand that you want the ability to create those if you wanted that. A significant number of crypto-related services should already be configured to recognize native segwit addresses, and if they don't, there is compatibility with nested segwit addresses in over 90% of the cases.

[BlackHatCoiner]

That's so true:

Although, it doesn't make much sense using legacy wallets and addresses nowadays

There's only ONE exception why one would prefer on using a legacy address and that's the signature verification part. Apparently, verifying a message which was signed using a SegWit address isn't standard. Each software implements a different way.

So if you ever wanted to sign a message which could be verified even from an abandoned project-site such as brainwallet you should use a legacy address.

There's not even one reason if you want to make transactions with it.

[dkbit98]

It was recently confirmed that Chainalysis runs public servers. Is it bad? We bitcoiners have known that this has always been possible.

We knew it was happening and I bet that government agencies are also running a bunch of nodes and servers for years, same way like they are using Tor and everything else for spying people.
It's not so hard or expensive to run your own node on some old computer or Raspberry Pi device.

There's not even one reason if you want to make transactions with it.

You can have your old coins in legacy address format (like there are a bunch of them) and that is a valid reason to use them to send and make new transaction with them.

Please let's all keep to the topic subject - Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet.
Thanks

[witcher_sense]

After the developers of Sparrow Bitcoin wallet have finally implemented Whirlpool, which is another way to CoinJoin bitcoin transactions, I decided to try it out. The question is how do I do mixing without leaking unnecessary information that may further be used to deanonymize me or to connect my identity to transactions I make in the bitcoin network. Assume I installed my personal bitcoin full node through Bitcoin Core wallet and connected my Sparrow wallet directly to it. Is that the right direction or am I supposed to connect my wallet to a public server instead? How do I properly configure my bitcoin full node? What further steps should I take to achieve maximum anonymity? I want to use Sparrow wallet in the most effective way possible...

[Pmalek]

<Snip>

Have you checked out this guide that explains how to use the Sparrow Wallet Whirlpool feature to protect your privacy?
Mixing with Whirlpool
This article by Samourai Wallet discusses Whirlpool CoinJoins:
Diving head first into Whirlpool Anonymity Sets

Unfortunately, I don't use this particular wallet and can't provide more precise information. Maybe these resources are a good start.

[dkbit98]

Assume I installed my personal bitcoin full node through Bitcoin Core wallet and connected my Sparrow wallet directly to it. Is that the right direction or am I supposed to connect my wallet to a public server instead?

You can participate in in Whirlpool only if you run full node with Ronin Dojo node package.
Sparrow is using same pools like Samourai wallet, they are just another client, and I would always choose Wasabi coinjoins rather than what Samourai is doing, but you can find detailed instructions on sparrow website.
I would wait for Wasabi 2.0 to come out soon, it should be more simple to use and I here some great improvements are coming, like reducing 0.1 BTC minimum.

How do I properly configure my bitcoin full node? What further steps should I take to achieve maximum anonymity?

There are many guides for running full Bitcoin node and it's nothing complicated, all you need is to have separate computer of RaspberryPi with hard drive, than you download entire Bitcoin blockchain, and let it run.

[witcher_sense]

You can participate in in Whirlpool only if you run full node with Ronin Dojo node package.
Sparrow is using same pools like Samourai wallet, they are just another client, and I would always choose Wasabi coinjoins rather than what Samourai is doing, but you can find detailed instructions on sparrow website.
I would wait for Wasabi 2.0 to come out soon, it should be more simple to use and I here some great improvements are coming, like reducing 0.1 BTC minimum.

You mean, despite that I already connected my Sparrow wallet to my Bitcoin Core node, I still have to have the Ronin Dojo node running to use Whirlpool Coinjoin anonymously?  What if I don't have Ronin Dojo? I heard that, in Samourai Wallet, if you are not running one, all the information about transactions and addresses goes directly to Samourai servers, which means they can deanonymize you if they want. However, in the article, it is said that "Sparrow does not ever use Samourai’s servers to provide wallet transactions or UTXO information. This information comes from your connected server, as it has always done. Only the independent Whirlpool server receives communication, and the data it receives is blinded so no privacy is lost when using Tor." I don't understand how in this case Samourai devs can obtain information about my transactions?

[dkbit98]

You mean, despite that I already connected my Sparrow wallet to my Bitcoin Core node, I still have to have the Ronin Dojo node running to use Whirlpool Coinjoin anonymously?

I never had Ronin Dojo node running, and I don't have any plan for doing that, so I can't tell you anything more about that.
My understanding is that nobody can obtain any information if you are using whirlpool correctly with Sparrow and enabled Tor, but I can't personally vouch for that.
It's relative to specific situation but Ronin Dojo is your own backend replacement for servers, so if only you are using Dojo in mixing round than privacy will obviously not exist.

[shield132]

Since this thread looks like an ANN thread of Sparrow Wallet, I'll ask this question here instead of creating a new topic.
I want to download Sparrow Bitcoin Wallet from sparrowwallet.com/download for Windows. I choose the following wallet ->> Type Windows Installer (7+); Link Sparrow-1.8.4.exe <-- Now the problem is that it takes almost one day to download the wallet while filesize is up to 98 MB. For some reasons, their servers don't let me to download it with normal internet speed and limit my download speed significantly. Does anyone know where is a good alternative to download this wallet? Or do you also experience download limit from Sparrow? I have no idea why that happens.

[Eleutheria]

Now the problem is that it takes almost one day to download the wallet while filesize is up to 98 MB. For some reasons, their servers don't let me to download it with normal internet speed and limit my download speed significantly.

I just downloaded it now and it took roughly 20 minutes to download with my personal internet connection. I do not think it is their server limiting your download speed and surely not intentionally. Could be an overload on available connections on the web server or some other reason.
Try clearing your cache and try again.

[Cricktor]

...

All download links at https://sparrowwallet.com/download/ point to Github links like https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/releases/download/<version>/<filename>. I just checked the Windows Installer download file link and it took me only 10+ seconds to download the file (download was finished after I chose the save file location as my browser is setup to always ask where to save a download file; I have a stable 100MBit/s downstream internet speed).

Maybe you experienced some temporary or local Github connectivity issues. And nobody except you can know what's going on in your local network.

20min for the download of ~100MB doesn't sound any fast either, but Eleutheria didn't mention any details of personal internet connection. Such a download time could happen when you only have something like 1MBit/s downstream.

[shield132]

Now the problem is that it takes almost one day to download the wallet while filesize is up to 98 MB. For some reasons, their servers don't let me to download it with normal internet speed and limit my download speed significantly.

I just downloaded it now and it took roughly 20 minutes to download with my personal internet connection. I do not think it is their server limiting your download speed and surely not intentionally. Could be an overload on available connections on the web server or some other reason.
Try clearing your cache and try again.

20 minutes is too much for 98 MB file unless you are using a cheap DSL internet with low speed and I personally use fiber optic and my speed is 100 Mbps. It should be downloaded in seconds instead of hours.
I finally managed to download it in one hour instead of a day. Thanks god, speed improved a little.

Maybe you experienced some temporary or local Github connectivity issues. And nobody except you can know what's going on in your local network.

20min for the download of ~100MB doesn't sound any fast either, but Eleutheria didn't mention any details of personal internet connection. Such a download time could happen when you only have something like 1MBit/s downstream.

Today I tried to download Sparrow Wallet again and the speed was improved but there were limits on download. There is definitely a problem on their side. I'll try to contact them and let them know about this issue.

[ABCbits]

Maybe you experienced some temporary or local Github connectivity issues. And nobody except you can know what's going on in your local network.

20min for the download of ~100MB doesn't sound any fast either, but Eleutheria didn't mention any details of personal internet connection. Such a download time could happen when you only have something like 1MBit/s downstream.

Today I tried to download Sparrow Wallet again and the speed was improved but there were limits on download. There is definitely a problem on their side. I'll try to contact them and let them know about this issue.

I tried download it just now, but it use my maximum internet speed. It's likely their server was overloaded, although there's small chance your ISP throttle your connection. Next time you experience this problem, you might want to use VPN and see whether you still experience slow download speed.