Is the work on Dandelion on hold?

[nopara73]

I am very interested in seeing this or a similar technology implemented into Bitcoin. Are you guys still actively working on it?

[gfanti]

Yes--we've been trying to sort out some theoretical questions that will impact our implementation decisions. This is taking a bit longer than expected, but we are actively working on it and will resume working on the implementation soon.

[nopara73]

Thank you. Based on my experience this would take years to be added to Core. I am working on three Bitcoin wallets (HiddenWallet, BreezeWallet, C# Bitcoin full node) and if private transaction broadcasting would be solved we could wipe out Tor dependency.

I am thinking about setting up an internal peer to peer network within our nodes (full nodes and full blockspv nodes (note: full block spv nodes don't keep mempool, nor blocks so cannot check a bunch of things, but they get all blocks and all mempool transactions)) implementing and deploying a temporary pre-alpha Dandelion within such internal p2p network until it gets into Bitcoin core.

I'd like to hear if you have some thoughts on this.

[gfanti]

Sure, you're obviously welcome to implement a pre-alpha-version of Dandelion among the full and full blockspvnodes, and we would be happy to advise if you have any questions. You should be aware that Dandelion doesn't give individual protections for nodes who are worried about eclipse attacks--this is meant to prevent large-scale monitoring. So nodes may still want to use Tor if they are worried about being individually targeted.