Sparrow 1.7.2 - connecting to BTC proxy

Marketplace & Services
1

Good morning,

I am attempting to connect Sparrow 1.7.2 to BTC proxy and am seeing this error:

Could not connect:

Error reply: Unable to set option: Failed to bind one of the listener ports.

Is a Tor proxy already running on port 9050?

2

Are you still having this issue? This suggest you are running Tor, but attempting to use Sparrow’s built-in daemon. You can switch to your daemon, or you can also connect locally now (direct to Core) with this guide: Sparrow

3

I am not. I rebooted sparrow and sparrow is now connected to my node!

One thing I was wondering. If I go into the BTC proxy service page and click “properties” then click “quick connect URLs” there is a tor address. When I was first playing around with your old guide, I was connecting sparrow with this TOR address, which is different than the RPC interface TOR address in Bitcoin core. Which one should I use? Are there advantages to one over the other, or should I stick with with the address from bitcoin core?

Thanks.

4

Is there an advantage to connecting to core rather than private electrum?
I couldn’t find the guide last week so I connected to private electrum and it seemed to work fine.

5

If you have no issues with electrs, then no. It may be more reliable of a connection for some. Eventually our improved connection options (coming this year) will be the real solution for reliable and fast use of all services.

6

I thought that there was an advantage to connect to private electrum, as bitcoin Core stores your public keys and balance unencrypted on the computer it is running on. If this computer is regularly connected to the internet, it is at risk to hackers - which will make you a target once your balance is discovered.

On the other hand Electrum server, does not keep any record of your balance, but indexes all Bitcoin transactions equally.

I’m running a pruned node, so electrum is not an option for me.

Dave, is there advantage to connecting to bitcoin proxy vs connecting to bitcoin core?

Thanks

7

Yes, electrum is definitely preferred and going directly to Core is opening up a much larger attack vector. Proxy has some extra features, but they will be added to Core and eventually Proxy will be deprecated. Probably later this year.