Workshop: Host your own Zcash servers

[outgoing.doze]

@aaal

If a user runs their own node and wallet locally, there should be no network traffic to observe: the communication between the wallet and the node can be completely private. An observer will only see things happening on the gossip-protocol layer (transactions in the mempool). That’s something but, therefore, it is at least possible that the origin of those transactions could be narrowed down to include or be pinpointed as being from that particular node.

@anon920

Chainalysis runs many nodes and attempts to make connections to all other nodes on the network. Then for each new transaction they see, they log the IP address of the first node that gossiped that transaction to one of Chainalysis’ nodes. This allows Chainalysis to identify through which node a given transaction was first submitted with a high level of certainty.

Either my or your understanding is completely incorrect. I wouldn’t mind if it’s me, but I think whichever one of us is wrong would really benefit from having this clarified.

The way I understand this situation, running your own node on your own computer / IP, is the worst thing you can do as far as Chainanalysis monitoring is concerned.