What does Wasabi Wallet connect to when it starts up, and why does it seem to ignore my settings?

Question

Wasabi Wallet 2.0.2.1

My goal is to connect the Wasabi Wallet to my Bitcoin Core node running on a different machine on my local network over IPv4. But it seems like Wasabi Wallet connects to its own set of nodes and ignores my settings.

In the Bitcoin tab of the Settings window, there is a field called Bitcoin P2P Endpoint. The documentation says:

If you have a Bitcoin full node already on a remote computer, then Wasabi Wallet can use this too. In the Bitcoin settings, specify the local IP address and port or the Tor onion service of your full node.

I assume, since they are talking about connecting to a remote computer, that they are referring to the local network when they say I should specify the local IP address. However, the example they show is this:

The documentation also says:

Wasabi will show up as one of the connected peers while it is downloading a block.

But I never see it in my peer list.

When I enter my node's IP address and port 192.168.1.27:8333 into this field, the wallet appears to start up just fine, with a message saying Downloading and processing Bitcoin network data.

However, I can change that field to something like 192.168.1.23:1111, an address that does not even exist on my network, and when I restart the wallet I see exactly the same message.

There is a small white circle with a checkmark in it in the lower right corner of the main window, and when I hover over that circle, it says:

Tor is turned off
Backend is connected
Peers 11 connected

Where are those 11 connected peers coming from? How can I know if one of them is mine when I don't see it as a connected peer? Is there a way to control which peers the wallet connects to?

Answer 1

From the Wasabi docs:

There are two ways to confirm that your Wasabi client is connected to your own full node.

First, in the Wasabi logs. Once you receive a transaction Wasabi downloads the block containing that transaction from your node, and in the logs you should see: Block acquired from local P2P connection.

Second, by checking the connected peers inside your full node. Wasabi will show up as one of the connected peers while it is downloading a block. You can check this in the Bitcoin Core / Knots GUI by clicking on Window -> Peers. During the period when Wasabi is fetching a block, it will show up in the User Agent column. Alternatively, you can use the Bitcoin RPC call bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo and see the Wasabi client listed.

Do you see Block acquired from local P2P connection in your Wasabi logs when you receive a transaction?

Note that the message is logged only when a block was fetched, and blocks are fetched only when needed, which means that you have to have a transaction in a new block if you want wasabi to get the block from somewhere.

Also make sure that you don't have any whitebind rule in bitcoin.conf that prevents inbound connections.

Where are those 11 connected peers coming from? How can I know if one of them is mine when I don't see it as a connected peer? Is there a way to control which peers the wallet connects to?

AFAIK the peers are used to broadcast your transactions when you send. No there is no way to control which peers the wallet connects to.