Bitcoin Forum

Hi!

The subject is pretty much self-explanatory, we've recently had some issues with a person mining via TOR to hide a huge botnet and/or a hopping proxy-pool.
What do YOU think about banning TOR-exit nodes from accessing bitcoin wallet and/or pool sites/services?

I guess it's a question of anonymity versus security here, we're going to discuss this internally to - but i want input from users regarding this.

Is there any reason NOT to? Besides the obvious reason of being truly anonymous.
The reasons i can think of, FOR doing so are plenty - hacked accounts, bruteforce attacks, money/bitcoin laundering and much more.

What do you think?

--
Regards, Jim
Bit LC Inc.
https://www.bitlc.net

I would allow tor users.  Why not?  I imagine it will all be botnets, but that is fine.  If my computer has some stuff on it, I'd prefer it get hot mining as I might notice that and correct the problem.  Otherwise, I'll have no clue my box is rooted all the hell.

I am not the internet police.  If peoples' computers getting hot and higher power bills are what it takes for there to be some incentive to unfuck OS security, fine by me.

Please don't spread FUD about Tor, you know wasn't a botnet, just a large miner. Regardless though, I doubt most botnets mine behind Tor... what would be the point?  They would be coming  from widely distributed points of origin anyway and any single node getting shut down would be virtually unnoticeable.  The entire point of a botnet is that it has compromised many different machines from many different locations.  It would be far more efficient to NOT use TOR with a botnet.

In fact, with the botnets I have seen on EMC, not a single one came through Tor and I've had some pretty big ones.  They just come from thousands of different IPs from all over the world, it's what makes it so hard to block them.

Here's what I think, the first mining pool to operate exclusively on TOR and provide automatic payouts is going to be my mining pool of choice as long as the fees are reasonable or the PPS numbers high enough.

Why exclusively?  Just curious... I would consider setting up an EMC node for Tor only, but it seems like that doesn't buy much?

I'm supporting mining over Tor directly for long time. Is there any advantage in having a Tor-only mining pool? I don't see any.

I think using TOR is just fine.

I've read the whole story and I have to take a side here. Bitlc is hoppable and you will get hopped. You can only blame yourself. How many months ago did you promise to change the reward method?

As the operator of a TOR exit node I know there's some abuse going on, but so far I've never been confronted with serious complaints (besides scanning, spam attempts etc.).

On the other hand, TOR enables a lot of people to access the Internet who couldn't do so otherwise. Think of China, Syria, Saudi-Arabia, Egypt...

Also take into account that the economies of several of those countries are weak and highly inflationary. Bitcoin could be a tool for those in revolutionary surroundings to have access to other "currencies".

In my humble opinion, TOR and Bitcoin should team up.

~drekk~

Hey inaba I saw somewhere that you're using torify and had a question.

I starting mining and running bitcoin-qt through tor a couple of days ago and noticed some warnings coming from tor regarding dns leakage.  I fixed that tonight by running cgminer into socat as a front end to tor.  The dns leakage was the only anonymity concern I had and socat took care of it.

Does torify take care of the dns leakage problem?

I wasn't really concerned with it, so I never bothered to investigate it further.  If someone wanted to track down my connections via DNS they are more than welcome to, as it wasn't really intended to hide my identity anyway.