2 Question about Full Node & Electrum Server

[Bitcoiner2023]

Good evening dear forum members,
I have 2 questions regarding Full Node and Electrum Server.

1) What can the owner of a full node see when I connect to his node?

2) What can the owner of an Electrum server see when I connect to his server?


That's actually it

Thank you very much and best regards

[Mia Chloe]

1) What can the owner of a full node see when I connect to his node?

He should be able to see your public IP address that's why it's advisable to make use of VPNs like Tor to mask your iP and Also anonymise your connection. Nodes you are connected to should also be able to view your node compatibility, and connection with other nodes. If you are making use of a wallet, nodes you are connected to will see transactions you broadcast and they can also rebroadcast the transaction if it isn't confirmed.

What can the owner of an Electrum server see when I connect to his server?

Likewise for Electrum the server should be able to see your IP address, public keys, your transaction history and UTXOs and also you Version of Electrum.
However they obviously can't see your seed phrase or private keys as well as your wallet encryption password.

Some people prefer to run their own mode too if they don't want to share any of these details.

[Cricktor]

1) Node owner sees your IP address or Tor's exit node address and your onion address; the version of your node, its capabilities, if your node transmits transactions or only blocks, your node's blockheight, your node's minimum transfer fee

2) Your Electrum client's IP address, all public addresses of your wallet because your Electrum wallet will ask the Electrum server to send the transaction history of every active public address in your wallet and subscribe to new transactions of every known public address of your wallet.

The Electrum server can assume that all public addresses belong to a connected client's wallet. Blockchain analysis companies like to run performant Electrum servers to aggregate public addresses that they can assume to belong to a particular wallet when Electrum wallet clients connect to them and request address histories.

For this reason I run my own full Bitcoin node and my own Electrum server so that my SPV wallets only need to ask my own Electrum server and my light wallet's privacy is maintained.

[Bitcoiner2023]

Some people prefer to run their own mode too if they don't want to share any of these details.

Is it actually possible to connect your own node to a public electrum server?

Or does that not work because the Electrum server itself is a node?

[Cricktor]

An Electrum server usually talks to his Bitcoin Core node and needs RPC credentials to submit needed RPC commands to the Core node. You don't want to give a foreign Electrum server the ability to talk via RPC to your Bitcoin Core node. Such RPC credentials or local cookie files containing random credentials are stored in config files of the Electrum server and you don't have access to those for some public Electrum server.

Usually an Electrum server gets blockchain data to build its data base from a Bitcoin node and the Electrum server needs to know the secret RPC credentials to properly talk with the Bitcoin node.

[hosseinimr93]

Likewise for Electrum the server should be able to see your IP address, public keys, your transaction history and UTXOs and also you Version of Electrum.

I don't think electrum sends the public keys to servers. To get the transaction history and UTXOs, all electrum needs is the list of the addresses.

Is it actually possible to connect your own node to a public electrum server?

You can run your own full node and have your own electrum server, so that you don't have to connect to the servers provided by third parties.

[ranochigo]

Is it actually possible to connect your own node to a public electrum server?

Or does that not work because the Electrum server itself is a node?

You cannot. Electrum servers are not the same as Bitcoin nodes, they have different protocols and are not compatible with each other. Electrum wallets can connect to Electrum servers, and Electrum server uses their own instance of their Bitcoin full node to be able to retrieve information.

If you value privacy, you should run a full node yourself. That, or don't use Electrum specifically.

[peter0425]

Good evening dear forum members,
I have 2 questions regarding Full Node and Electrum Server.

1) What can the owner of a full node see when I connect to his node?

The owner will be able to see the time and duration that you have connected to the owner's node the most obvious one of course is your ip address but the owner will have no access or will not see your private keys

2) What can the owner of an Electrum server see when I connect to his server?

Like your earlier question, your ip address will be seen by the owner as well as your transactions history and data

No content of your wallet will be visible even if you connect to a node of another

[ABCbits]

1) What can the owner of a full node see when I connect to his node?

Other member already answered when you connect as full node. But if you connect as lightweight/SPV wallet (which use BIP 158), your wallet would request block filter and block which contain transaction on your opened wallet.

Likewise for Electrum the server should be able to see your IP address, public keys, your transaction history and UTXOs and also you Version of Electrum.

I don't think electrum sends the public keys to servers. To get the transaction history and UTXOs, all electrum needs is the list of the addresses.

If we want to be accurate on this matter, then we should say scripthash instead. https://electrumx-spesmilo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/protocol-methods.html mention these calls.

Code:

blockchain.scripthash.get_balance(scripthash)
blockchain.scripthash.get_history(scripthash)
blockchain.scripthash.get_mempool(scripthash)
blockchain.scripthash.listunspent(scripthash)

[nc50lc]

Good evening dear forum members,
I have 2 questions regarding Full Node and Electrum Server.

I noticed that the two questions seem disconnected.
I'm thinking that you're talking about something that can either connect to Bitcoin Core and public Electrum servers.

Perhaps, this is related to your previous topic about "Specter Wallet"?

If so, if it's connected to (your) Bitcoin Core, the owner will see entirely everything except private keys.
It will mirror your wallet as a watch-only wallet in Bitcoin Core where the owner of the node can see your every transactions, addresses, and even xpubs.
You shouldn't be connecting Specter to other people's Bitcoin Core anyways.

[Forsyth Jones]

An Electrum server usually talks to his Bitcoin Core node and needs RPC credentials to submit needed RPC commands to the Core node. You don't want to give a foreign Electrum server the ability to talk via RPC to your Bitcoin Core node. Such RPC credentials or local cookie files containing random credentials are stored in config files of the Electrum server and you don't have access to those for some public Electrum server.

Usually an Electrum server gets blockchain data to build its data base from a Bitcoin node and the Electrum server needs to know the secret RPC credentials to properly talk with the Bitcoin node.

I have a personal electrs server (rust), but i don't have and don't know how to view the IP address of the client that connected to my server, it's open to listen to connections coming from outside my local network (0.0.0.0).

My electrs was installed directly, isn't an instance of pre-configured nodes like raspblitz, mynode, etc. It is installed directly on my linux.

I configured it around 2020-21 on my old notebook and only update it from time to time, i use bitcoin core more directly.

Maybe electrs doesn't have this capability, but other servers like electrumX can do this.

Does everyone who runs electrs have the ability to see the IP address of clients/wallets that connect to their servers?

[Cricktor]

My main Electrum server that I run with Fulcrum is deliberately not public, so it won't announce its presence and availability. Log files usually show when Electrum clients connect and communicate.

My experimental Umbrel box on a Raspi runs Electrs as Electrum server. I didn't check how it's configured, might have to look under the hood first. To the outside world it should only be reachable via its Tor address. I would've to dig deeper to figure out if it's public or not and how it logs connection and communication requests.

I would be very surprised if Electrs doesn't have an IP logging option. I never had the need for it, though.