Nodes & your privacy

In plain words

Every wallet must ask somebody: what's my balance? Did that payment confirm? Ask someone else's server, and you have handed it your address list, your IP, your timing — a portrait of your finances, built from your questions. Your own full node answers from a copy of the chain on your own disk. The questions never leave the machine. Nobody learns which addresses you watch, because nobody is asked.

Why it matters

• The quietest leak in Bitcoin: not the chain, but your queries about it.
• A node turns privacy from a service you request into a fact you own.
• Running it over Tor hides your node's address even from its peers.

Go deeper

• Full node
• Why run a node?
• Light client (SPV)