Leaking your XPUB is a privacy risk. Whoever gets that knows every address that belongs to your wallet: past, present and future. They donβt necessarily know those addresses belong to *you* personally, but they know the addresses go together.
The most likely way youβll leak your XPUBs is by connecting to an Electrum server, or a vendorβs wallet that collects this data.
When you start up Sparrow, itβll ask how you want to connect to your node. Options include Bitcoin Core, private Electrum server, and public Electrum server. For maximum privacy and speed, itβs best to run your own Electrum server. Iβve used ElectrumX and Fulcrum. Iβve heard good things about electrs but I havenβt tried it.
If your wallet has previously been connected to some other service, like, say, your hardware vendorβs app, then your XPUB has in all likelihood already been leaked. The only way to keep this private is to set up your own wallet from scratch and ensure that your wallet software (Sparrow) only connects to a private Electrum server (preferred self-hosted).
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Awesome infos. You helped a ton ππͺ
Planning to spin um my own node soon (hardware is on the way). But i didnβt know that i have to set up a completely new seed then
Wow! Ton of information here indeed!
I mean. Using the XPUB to generate a watch-only wallet (for instance on Blockstream green) comes in handy I think. But indeedβ¦ it βleaksβ all your addresses to some software you donβt own. However, that software being open source is βsaferβ?
Thanks again for your huge help π
I thought through this and have another question:
When i set up a completely fresh keysore because i am afraid my xpub was leaked and then send the funds to the new keystore, arenβt they still trackable by the entity that knows the previous xpub? canβt they just link the transaction to the new adress? π€