Has the Dandelion Protocol Ever Been Used?

Found an old entry from a mailing list dating back about 8 years. I saw this in the Bitcoin Wiki and it looks like Dandelion could be a better solution for broadcasting transactions, compared to just syncing a whole node through the Tor network. Plus, there are way more clearnet nodes than Tor nodes it seems.

Sounds like you're trading security for a bit more privacy. Not sure if it’s worth it. There are plenty of ways to send your transaction without giving away your IP. If you really *need* a node you control, better to just use two nodes in different locations.

How does using Dandelion make broadcasting less secure? The transaction's already signed, right?

That might be BIP-0156 in the current list? If not, I think it has similar goals and authors. But it’s definitely not listed among the implemented BIPs in the reference client.

Thanks for that. What’s the reason it wasn't picked up by Core? Was it performance issues or just the fact it might not connect to another node reliably?

You don’t actually need to sync your node over Tor to send a transaction through it. Wasabi Wallet has offered private broadcasting for a while, and it just got integrated into Bitcoin Core.

Check out this pull request. They were working on getting it into Bitcoin Core. But like someone said earlier, there are better options out there.

I remember starting a thread ages ago called "Dandelion A protocol to hide transaction origin". If you mean the initial sync by "syncing an entire node", I’d say using a VPN is a better choice. The info on bitnodes.io shows that around 65% of reachable nodes actually use Tor, so that needs to be taken into account.