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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Not forward the transaction (I can tell relatively quickly by checking the mempool)

You mixing things up here, the mempool won't help you since your whatsapp proxy could tamper it. The only reliable thing is the chain itself once your transaction has been inserted in a mined block.

> 2. Doxx me/report me/etc by observing my IP, Whatsapp account name, and what wallet it is connected to.

But when doing direct crypto transaction is a crime in your country, this is a more serious threat than “tampering the transaction” or anything. Going to jail, or being tortured by some gang who want your private key, or both depending how corrupt the police is in that country.

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How can Whatsapp tamper with my transaction without my private key?

Not Whatsapp themselves, the proxying bot. And I'm not talking about tampering the transaction but the mempool (or at least the view you have about it) to make you believe they've forwarded the transaction.

But as I said, this is not what matters: the doxxing part is the deadly threat.

Re #1: Not forwarding the transaction.

You can tell within about 15 seconds or so if a transaction hasn't hit the memepool. Just look up you wallet on blockchain.com/etherscan etc. It's a standard step that nearly every send/receive UI offers a link after submitting a transaction. These services mark mempool transactions as "pending" before they are inserted into a block.

For example, here's a wallet for Gemini, you can see pending transactions under the "Age" column as they hit the mempool [0]. They are "pending" while in the mempool and then are labeled with a time as they are added to blocks.

I'm continually impressed with how resilient the system is, even more-so after our thread about a hypothetical adversary.

(Again you can run your own mempool service on your own node, and publish transactions to it, but in our hypothetical situation you need to instead issue it out through a Whatsapp channel manually.)

[0] https://etherscan.io/address/0x056fd409e1d7a124bd7017459dfea...

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