If you are running your own node, everything you do will be limited to your own node or server, but if you are using an external server/node, there is a high chance they are going to see everything from your wallet addresses. Your wallet needs to be synced to date before you can see the total balance of Bitcoin left on your wallet's addresses. If you don't want any person to see everything, you have to run your own for your privacy, or alternatively, you can choose to connect your hardware with the server (external) with a single private key load on your hardware, only if you want to risk that particular wallet address been watch.
I need my own node if I am using a wallet with many addresses I don't want linked to same identity.
But if I don't have my own node, then I can still have good privacy if I only have 1 address per wallet and use tor to connect to the public node?
If yes, then I am guessing I can accomplish that by only exporting 1 public address from the hardware wallet at a time? For example if I have a sparrow wallet that is brand new and unused, then i connect the hardware wallet and export 1 address to sparrow. Now I can get balance for my address from a public node and send transaction and other things and they won't know my other addresses.
Later if I want to use another address, I would need to create a new sparrow wallet that is unused and then repeat by exporting the other address from hardware wallet to the other sparrow wallet?
It is more work like this but it works pretty well to protect privacy?
I wanted to chip in because i don't feel like enough emphasis has been put on the answer of this question...
If you'd extend your seed phrase with a long passphrase and share said seedphrase (minus the passphrase) online, you'd go from having a wallet that would require trillions and trillions of years using a whole server farm to bruteforce to a wallet that could be bruteforced in a couple of days/months/years by somebody who has a couple GPU's laying around.
It's not just "not adviseable", it's really "not done". It's the equivalent of securing your physical gold by laying it on a public bus seat with a "do not touch" stuck to it while you're away versus storing it in for knox.
I asked mostly to understand better the strength of the passphrase. Are you sure it's really as weak as you make it sound? If I use a password manager to generate a random passphrase that is extremely strong with 200+ bits of entropy, you think it can be brute forced in 2-3 years with a couple GPU?
Also isn't it unnecessary to have 24 words in seed phrase instead of 12? I've read a few dicussion about that and that is what I think most agreed on. But the videos I watched of people setting up hardware wallets, they only have the choice of 24 words seed phrases.