Bitcoin Forum

Imagine TOR but optimized to be high speed as the whole network runs with BTC integrated. Bandwidth costs BTC using micro-transactions. Abuse of the network costs money/resources and the network is compensated in a free market fashion. Technologies like bitcoin are integrated, proof of work, and proof of storage, etc are all integrated. People would run Bitcoin-TOR like nodes to make a little bit of money while users enjoy high speed.

What makes it the killer app? People who want to surf anonymously AND have high speed will now have to get BTC to enjoy it! It will make a market that requires people to get bitcoin since such a thing is not available any other way.

TOR itself was already considering this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJD1hDKDqlo (@ min. 5:00)

Sorry, to be clear: not with Bitcoin itself.. just the micro-payments part.

this indeed would be killer.

I wonder how much work it would be to integrate bitcoin or would it have to be completely done from scratch?

what you have to start with is improving the speed and efficiency of Tor.

then somehow incentivize Tor nodes with Bitcoin traffic payments.  the faster the node the more they get paid.  how you screen out gov't nodes i have no idea.

the point is i would gladly pay Bitcoin to use a high speed anonymous Tor network.

I feel like there will always be a way to uncover TOR users, resulting a cat and mice chase to cover yourself up, but a high speed option would be great non the less.

I always thought that tor needed to have incentives for nodes. This sounds like a good idea. It'll also keep bit torrenters off of the tor network too.

i just wanted to say I've been thinking about this for a while and i think its a really great idea.

also consider that you wouldn't necessarily need to use the internet. the if we had a real market in data transmission it would offer such good incentive for people to carry other peoples data that it could potentially be used to build a parallel internet with its own infrastructure provided by thousands of small entrepreneurs rather than giant ISP's.

I speak of course of meshnets. The market in data transmission would solve the sorts of load balancing problems that are causing scalability issues for meshnet researchers today. I have this theory that the reason meshnet researchers are unable to make scalable meshnets is precisely because they are computer scientists not economists and so they do not realize that this is an economics problem and not a computer science problem.

Did you forget that Bitcoin isn't anonymous? Kinda defeats the point of Tor to de-anonymise it...

It's anonymizable. That's good enough.

Couldn't coinjoin be built in? And if that wasn't good enough people could mine to have access to the anonymous Internet. Or just buy BTC in person with cash.

or maybe recruit/pay miners to be Tor nodes? 

there seem to be plenty of them around all over the world.  if you mine to protect the Bitcoin network, then you probably wouldn't mind being paid BTC to be a high speed anonymous Tor node.  it would be unlikely for a gov't to be a Tor node AND mine BTC to protect the Bitcoin network. 

seem to be mutually exclusive. 

Not really.

Someone perfect, with no interaction with the real world, might be able to use it anonymously.
But nobody's perfect.

Coinjoin should be able to help though? Perhaps it can be set up where you are paying the entrance node and they wouldn't know what your looking at the exit node.

I'm talking about coin mixing and then making payments directly from the mixing service. you could access the mixing service through slow tor.

Most people aren't overly concerned with privacy. look at what people put up on facebook. bitcoin has many killer apps:  remittances, micropayments (in general), international trade, international freelancing (think about talented indian people doing jobs on elance for bitcoin), and as a store of value. But yeah, bitcoin anonymous internet service providers would be neat.

Exactly, the Bitcoinized TOR would be fast becuase you can optimize it without worrying about abuse or spam since all bandwidth will be paid for.

along this line I thought that hosting the blockchain on a redundant distributed cloud where anyone can contribute with his bandwidth and disk space in order to gain a fraction of the network fees might make the original client much more practical (electrum-like), while giving ppl an easy way to contribute significantly to the bitcoin network's resiliency and gain some btc.

Probably right. The idea seems to work best for exit nodes (who aren't as anonymous) but not so much for relay nodes :/

it's anonymous enough for this I'm sure. What an excellent idea. Bitcoin is anti bank. Anti bank markets have potential. Tor is pro privacy. Pro privacy markets have a HUGE demand and basically zero supply.

I have had this idea for a long time, but rather than your normal proof of work, the network takes input from the user paying the service to move data (each user pays several dollars a day, pay as you use style) and the network compensates all the nodes with a small fraction of that sum for moving data. Each internal connection a node helps make (between user A and user B) and for each byte a node moves from A to B is rewarded. So the proof of work is actual work for the network. This system could run on top of conventional internet hardware and over mesh networks. All working nodes get a small compensation for pushing data and connections.

So 100% of the space and computational work from the nodes (miners) would go towards the useful work needed for a TOR like network that would be very powerful. It works based on the greed incentive and people would have an incentive to create nodes all around the world. The large ISP's would become giant nodes, getting their money working as a node on the network, and wireless routers would eventually have the software on board so if they server data to a mesh user, they get a slight reward (that can even go towards paying for their own internet usage) (Basically everyone can be their own mini ISP by being a node) But other nodes will confirm the work and payments too, so no internet censorship or network shaping can happen (you pay for more bytes to go through and the more you pay the faster your internet is (because some high capacity nodes will be scarce compared to lower capacity nodes and market forces, blah blah) but a node can't disciminate based on the contents of the bytes, the encryption may be made in such a way that things are encrypted and keys sent through computationally proven paths that don't intersect with where the data is making anonymous internet a thing.

Anyway I wrote about it here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274933.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=274933.0)

I made the assumption that it would be an entire new coin based around the POW being move bytes around the world. Instead of the current POW.

I still think the first coin that makes "being the internet infrastructure itself" as its proof of work will be the coin to supersede Bitcoin. But I am naive and probably wrong. And also if this is a better and more useful POW, then a Bitcoin hardfork is always possible.

Anyway, there are a million reasons why my idea doesn't work, maybe one day I can work them out? Probably not.

In short - "it's a bad idea/bullshit". Longer version follows :).

0. Initially tor was designed to give anonymity to some not-government-friendly guys. Like people in some Ira[nq]/China/etc - where do they get BTC? Buying is not an option (CC payments are monitored), mining - neither an option (how much can you mine with some netbook CPU?).

1. By tor node you mean what? Tor exit node to internet? Bridge? Relay? All of them? Running first = you get responsible for any BS that happens from your IP/connection. And to hack/crack some site - one needs way less bandwidth than for normal surfing, doing application-level DDoS on a small website has low bandwidth requirements as well (like do a full-text search) - so basically "no profit for exit nodes, rather pain in their ass".
 I understand that you may mean "tor-alike" network as well - but a network w/o internet exits is a network for geeks. Remember that search engines is what makes the internet as usable as it is.

2. Consider governments running tor nodes = you offer to pay governments with bitcoins. For them being able to perform statistical analysis and catch you. Super-good idea, will make the happy.

3. Profitability and usage cost. To get $5 equivalent of a "normal" connection tor spends $15+. With basically unpredictable result - you never know if your packets will pass through 32kbit/s node or through 100mbit/s node before it starts happening.

4. Micro-payments? Remember LTC dust? That's the same story.

5. Mesh networks and economy... Doesn't scale well w/o strict hierarchy (like fidonet) - no science degree needed to understand that. RAM and CPU requirements for BGP "full-view" at internet core routers can give you some clue - but keep on mind they route traffic for the whole subnets, "BGP flapping" is yet another clue. Licensing - you propose private individuals to provide data transfer services&such (to build alternative to the internet) w/o any state licenses. Remember, WiFi was illegal not so long ago in many countries (and still has restrictions on power and frequencies used as well).

The only somewhat interesting scheme can be data-storage related, but remember what's written in 2. Something like that is done in PPS.TV (which essentially is a distributed data storage on user hard drives w/o their consent&understanding)

ok den gg.

lol "flapping"

The problem with any TOR-like network is who runs the exit nodes.  And why would they?  You have idealists, or crazy people, and they are often the same, who don't mind the gendarmes raiding their home every few months, or somehow are oblivious to the fact this will inevitably happen (i.e. morons), or you have people who don't fear police raids because they ARE the police.  And not only does one group often mimic the other, but occasionally, people travel back and forth between those two groups.

Similarly, who are the people who actually would pay for Internet anonymity?  You have your idealist group, but the much larger group is people who pay for anonymity because it's cheaper than paying for a lawyer and more pleasant than doing time in prison.  I.e., people doing seriously illegal shit.

Truly robust anonymity requires anonymity essentially being a standard, so that there is nothing unusual about it at all and you actually have to go out of your way NOT to be anonymous.  It needs to be built in at the hardware, firmware level so that people don't even notice it.  Once you tailor it as solely a commodity for purchase, the "I have nothing to hide" idiots are going to opt out, and anonymity itself becomes suspicious.

This idea is both reasonable and workable for a certain set of scenarios.

For example, consider the following use case for a Tor hidden service. You wish to run a service, like a mining pool, non-anonymously but with the location of your hot wallet obfuscated. The reason for this is you are afraid of infrastructure-level attacks like the one against Linode or OVH where the VPS provider was hacked, or attacks where someone co-locates a VM next to yours to use a side-channel attack. By hiding the location of your server, the surface area for attack is shrunk considerably.

Here's another use case: you wish to use a secure messaging system like Pond (https://pond.imperialviolet.org) which is designed to defeat traffic analysis. The fact that you use Pond is itself not a secret, however (perhaps you are Glenn Greenwald).

In both these cases, you would benefit from a fast well incentivised onion network, but you yourself don't particularly fear exposure as a user of it. Thus the anonymity of Bitcoin (or lack of it) is not particularly a concern of yours.

In this case using micropayment channels (https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/wiki/WorkingWithMicropayments) makes sense. To implement this you would extend the Tor protocol with a new cell type that runs the micropayment protocol inside of it - it's designed for embedding inside other protocols, so this is not difficult. The process of building a circuit would then involve not only extending the circuit through a new relay, but also building a micropayment channel to that relay and putting some value into it. You would then buy relay capacity in chunks of, say, 500kb.

Interesting idea.  There still has to be a way for bandwidth and money to be mutually fungible, so you can't tell the (probably dangerous activity-creating) payers from the (probably idealistic) bandwidth suppliers.

If you use btc properly you can be fully anonimous with them

You can say that about any medium of exchange, though.  Replace "btc" with "cash" in that sentence and it's just as true.

The media often talk about Bitcoin and throw around the word "anonymous."  However, there is nothing inherently anonymous about Bitcoin, and unlike cash, if you screw up your anonymity measures with Bitcoin, there is a permanent record of it.  Bitcoin is not really anonymous at all.  In fact, it's the opposite.  Non-repudiability is basically the opposite of anonymity, and it is much more the core of Bitcoin than anonymity.

Why not try JonDoBrowser?

It's based on Tor, and accepts Bitcoin.

It practically eliminates the problem of being tracked by your browser through points of identification. It's higher speed for the paid (bitcoin) service. Free service also available.

https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/ (https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/)

I'd plainly say "forget about exit nodes". period.

Noone in clear state of mind would like to participate in a risky business w/o appropriate reward. Only police, idealists and idiots.


Tor exists for like over 10 years. 1600 relays. ROTFL. Using tor exits to the unencrypted internet is a commonly known bad idea. Anonymity being a standard? Only if half of linux distros ship with it set up by default out of the box - something may have a veeeery slight chance to change. If Windows ships with it - well, things will change - but it's utopistic scenario.
Search engines don't work well with tor/i2p sites - no search=no network. Suppose I want to find some "illegal goods/services" - I bet I'll sooner google it in "normal" network than in some tor/i2p. Who will write search engine that can compete with google, but for tor/i2p?
We have tons of "spam links" in "normal net", it's a problem - but search engines help solving it. Who will do it in tor/i2p&alike?

A) you already can run it that way for free
b) the hacking approach will be to silently hack (get hired or even get a court order) into VPS provider where you're running your frontend, examine its configs - and voila, the backend is located either somewhere in the normal net or some tor node. Finding the real location of the tor node can be way more difficult of course - but it's rarely needed. I don't think it's a problem to DDoS a tor node/serivce either (surely on app level, not by bandwidth attacks).

As for "why not use browser XXX" - using a browser alone doesn't save your ass. I got somewhat frightned when I got mine almost exact location (that is like 50m+- precision) when pressed "allow to find my location" in a browser. Even if the browser was running via tor - the result would have been the same (sort of a homework - guess why). Using anonymizing proxies - well, it's faster, but who runs them? "the good guys, no logs, bla-blah" - BS, it's not really necessary to log anything as everything may already be logged at upstreams. It's even worse than tor.