Has Dandelion been put into practice?

Came across an old message from about 8 years back. Found it on the Bitcoin Wiki and honestly, I think Dandelion could be a better option for broadcasting transactions without using up so much bandwidth. Like, syncing a whole node through the Tor network and relying on that just seems a bit heavy. Plus, let’s be real, there are way more clearnet nodes compared to Tor nodes.

This sounds like a trade-off of sacrificing security in favor of getting marginal levels of privacy. I am not sure if this has been implemented, but I don't think it is a good idea. There are already plenty of ways to broadcast your transaction without revealing your IP address. If for some reason, you *needed* to use a node you fully control, and it could not use TOR, you could broadcast your transaction with two of your nodes that are in geographically diverse locations.

I don't see how it makes the transaction broadcasting less secure. The raw transaction has already been signed.

That should be BIP-0156 in the current BIP list; if not, it has similar goal (and authors) Link: github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0156.mediawiki But it's not in the list of implemented BIPs in the reference client. List of implemented BIPs by Bitcoin Core: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/bips.md

Thanks. Why was it not implemented by Core in the end? Performance tradeoffs, or lack of guarantee that a hop to another node could always be found?

You don't have to sync your node over Tor to broadcast a transaction over Tor. Wasabi Wallet has had this private broadcast feature forever, and it was just merged into Bitcoin Core: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/29415 Murch explained why this method is preferable to Dandelion in the Bitcoin Optech podcast:

I'll just point you to this pull request where they aimed to get it implemented in Bitcoin Core. Link: Dandelion transaction relay (BIP 156) #13947 That's beside the reasons in the post above which is a better alternative.

I just remember i created this thread many years ago, [Discussion] Dandelion - A protocol to hide transaction origin. If you mean initial block download / initial sync when you say "syncing an entire node", IMO you better do it with VPN. Looking at https://bitnodes.io/charts/ which only count reachable node, it's not true. Currently it shows 65% of them use Tor.