Despite the recent downturn in the market, Chia community is still actively developing ecosystem. Recently, some users got confuse with connecting to other Silicoin’s wallet instead of full nodes. In fact, there are same cases in Chia as well.
Overview
There is a special case occurs in Chia network. When your client is not connected to a full peer node, it sometimes connects to someone else's wallet in some way, but you will see two wallet nodes in the list. The odd situation where one is located at a standard address (your own wallet) and the other at some random IP address.
Some users may think that they were hacked or there was a bug in the system when they saw that Chia's full-node wallet showed connections to other wallets. Many of the users may not understand how and why it happens on such situations, and coming with a question: Is there any security risk in the Chia and Chia forks?
Why does my Chia / Silicoin clients automatically connect to someone else's wallet instead of the full node?
In fact, they don’t have to worry on such situation as it belongs to normal condition. By default setting, Chia's wallet allows others to actively connect to your wallet by inputting your IP and port. Likewise, you can also connect to anyone else's wallet node, which has no security risks and only improves the efficiency of network verification.
The user may have a doubt, how do you know my IP and port? Here the official document writing is clear, all nodes will purse to peer node broadcast their information on a regular basis, including IP and port. Thus, the whole network know that they are still in the running, and others can be arbitrarily connected in a network of several other purse.
We need to know that Chia has a full node process and a farmer process. Farmers don't maintain blocks, but they trust a full node to provide updates for mining; The main function of full nodes is to verify blocks and maintain the network. Full nodes do not earn any rewards or fees, but they are important for maintaining consensus rules and system security. Running full nodes can make users confident in the integrity of the blockchain, and we all want to maintain the overall Chia network and make it better. This feature has no security implications for user funds.
Any More Questions?
1. Why would anyone do this unless it was profitable? Is it just for fun?
In fact, you can save disk space and resources by not setting nodes locally.
2. What will affect to other users?
This does not affect to other users. For example, if I have a machine that only provides full node service, other Full Nodes and wallets can be connected to it. Chia's technical architecture allows for this.
3. If it saves disk space and doesn't affect others, why don't most people consider doing it?
If the node service is not started locally, the mining efficiency will be reduced. Therefore, generally no one wants to do this unless the hard drive resources are really limited.
Reference
Finally, there has been an in-depth discussion on this issue among Chia fans abroad. You may go to Reddit and read the original post for interested https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/n19qk6/why_am_i_connected_to_other_wallets_instead_of