Bitcoin full node question (accessible to everyone)

[BlackHatCoiner]

What would be the risks for running a public node, are there any risks at all?

Unless it's illegal to use bitcoin in your country, I'd say close to zero. If you route everything through Tor (and therefore obscuring your activity to your Internet provider as well) even less risk. I honestly can't think of one risk in that case.

Can I also use the public node myself,
or should i rather use a private node for my private wallet?

There's no such thing as a "private node". You're either a node of the network or you aren't. What you meant is that you can use your locally accessible wallet software which will connect to your public node in a private manner, and yes you can do it. You can install a Bitcoin client (such as Bitcoin Core) which will download you the blockchain, and you can setup an electrum server, which will connect with your Bitcoin node and your Electrum lightweight wallet software, to serve you your balance privately.

[1714325198]

1714325198

[o_e_l_e_o]

Can I also use the public node myself

Certainly. Any wallet which is not itself a full node (such as Bitcoin Core or other full node software such as Bitcoin Knots) will connect to public nodes (usually via an intermediary server) to collect the data it needs to display your transaction history and balance and be able to broadcast transactions. The node(s) or server(s) which you connect to in order to gather this information are able to see that you are querying this information, and are therefore able to link all the addresses in your wallet together and link all of them to your IP address and other information you might leak, such as the wallet software or device identifiers.

or should i rather use a private node for my private wallet?

If you want to protect your privacy from the issue I have just described above, then you must run your own node and either use it as your wallet or point any other wallet software you might use (such as Electrum) exclusively at your own node (via an Electrum server which you also run).

[LoyceV]

Aside from general linux/server security, check ToS of your VPS provider. Few provider such as Hetzner explicitly forbid cryptocurrency node.

Isn't that limitation for mining only? A VPS shares resources with other clients, and thus anything that continuously consumes 100% isn't allowed.
I've also used a VPS that didn't allow Bitcoin Core at all (it just got killed after a few seconds), but renaming the executable and limiting the load (say to 0.2) was enough to keep it running.