Bitcoin Forum

100% of your donations go into operational costs of Tor exit nodes and bridges. Every user of Tor will benefit from more servers - more anonymity and more speed. We are the first instance who are able to provide private bridge IPs to activists/organizations.

Wouldn't it be much better if some form of tor would be invented that supports paying for the service on a usage basis?

You really don't want to turn the Tor network into a capitalist system,

especially when those affected by censorship are usually the people without money.

There, you have some problems:

    * The anonymity would be somehow compromised since the relay would be able to link different connections of yours. He still shouldn't be able to decrypt it if he's not the exit-node, nor know your IP, but anyway, sounds a bit more vulnerable than the current protocol...
    * There's a trust issue too. If it's a prepaid contract, the user has to trust the relay. If it's post-payed, it's the relay that must trust the user. Maybe the best would be a prepaid service with some sort of flagging mechanism to ban fraudulent relays. But then, all the thief-relay needs to do is request a new IP to his ISP...

There is no single point of donation, but still, monetary rewards would really create stronger incentives for people to make their bandwidth available. And I think it's feasible with bitcoins.

First, it would be tricky to implement.  I don't say it's not possible, but I guess it would be an entire project.

Second, bandwith is actually some kind of "money" which is exchanged on the TOR network.  Basically the incentive to give their bandwith would be some bandwith. 

Anyway I don't like the idea of paying to use TOR.  We already pay internet providers.  It's kind of a double bill.

hehe, I don't like the idea of paying for anything, I always prefer "free stuff", but you know, there's no such thing as free lunch. ;)

That's why I'd have no problem paying for TOR to fight the stupid law to counteract my forced funding of the stupid law.

The thing is that I think anonimity should be part of Internet provider service.  They are legally forced to montitor and log all IPs they assign.  So with TOR you would pay to counter the law.  I hate this idea.   If I must pay for something that would be free without a stupid law, then I'll go broke very quickly.   Writing a stupid law doesn't cost much.  And if it does cost, you'l finance it by stealing people anyway.  I can't fight against that with money.  Fighting against laws should be free.

There are other pay versions of Tor available.

Sure :) But how do you want to ensure a 'constant stream' of Bitcoin donations?

There is NO "pay version of Tor". You can use JAP and pay for higher bandwidth, yes, but it has a different design and thus different anonymity properties.

I especially like that Tor is free for everyone. If you want a faster net, donate towards us or share your own bandwidth. You can also donate to Torproject for development. The roadmap includes discussion of "incentives": https://blog.torproject.org/blog/two-incentive-designs-tor

All our Tor exit nodes allow port 8333. You can find the servers at http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/index.php?SR=Bandwidth&SO=Desc (look for addresses ending in .torservers.net).

We have a total of 1200.13 BTC at the moment. Thanks!!

Bitcoin address at https://www.torservers.net/donate.html#anonymous

Great idea.

$ bitcoind getinfo
{
    "version" : 50000,
    "balance" : 0,
    "blocks" : 161736,
    "connections" : 3,
    "proxy" : "127.0.0.1:9050",

Red Emerald, you mean that with this patch bitcoin clients are able to send their .onion (or eventually another darknet) URL to other bitcoin nodes in the discovery process?
The bitcoin network may now operate inside a darknet if everybody wants to?

Yup.  No need to require everybody, though. Just a few people (like me and you) need nodes that connect Torland to the Internet.  My node is setup to talk to both networks.

By the way, I've never created a Tor hidden service. Is is something simple? And by simple, I mean something that an average computer user could do, like, is there a wizard install and all? If you have to go though text files, most people would just give up.
If there's such a thing, it would be a good idea to start releasing a bitcoin+Tor* bundle that configures everything and launches your bitcoin already behind a hidden service.

* I say Tor but I guess it could be I2P too... whichever is easier.

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_coin/
HiddenServicePort 8333 127.0.0.1:8333

proxy=127.0.0.1:9050
externalip=p2hwc26zdsrqxiix.onion
listen=1
discover=1

Sounds like a great way to pay to have the government sniff you

</ troll>

No wizards.  All you do is add 2 lines to your torrc and you have a hidden service.


Then you reload Tor, and 'cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_coin/hostname'

To get bitcoin to use this, just add a couple lines to your bitcoin.conf


The .onion in this example is me, it will obviously be something different for you.

They can feel free to sniff my encrypted traffic.  And if you are really paranoid, run https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

Perhaps there's a way one can buy access to a bridge and help fund the project in the process?

One guy from Austria has been raided for running Tor exit node.

Moritz, can you please confirm that William contacted you?

In light of the recent leaks regarding NSA and GCHQ (UK secret service), I think it's well worth pushing this thread. :)

https://www.torservers.net/donate.html

Not that I hadn't expected something like prism to be happening ("why the f..k would microsoft acquire skype for 8 gUSD"), but a suspicion in my head is different from the fact actually being confirmed.

Allegedly, Skype built in lawful intercept *before* it was sold to Microsoft.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/20/skype-nsa-access-user-data

A lot has happened at Torservers. Since we never wanted to grow to be too large, decentralization is crucial for Tor, we put a lot of effort into bootstrapping new organizations all around the globe. Our website now lists nine organizations, with a few more in the making. This is all very exciting, and I am happy to have the Bitcoin community backing our goals.

Also, just because, I created a Ripple wallet just now, so if you have some XRPs, you can send it to rPEmCPhNcQuTVuTmByWMDj2vZgzt4EY9pt.

There's even more happy news to report, but I can't give that away right now. Watch out for a press release soon! I hope to see some of you at Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. I wish I could come to Bitcoin Expo this weekend, some really nice people there, but unfortunately I can't make it.

Bitcoin address: 17dHghQZw1hv7uAY5RLnGySQ8fUyazkpwu
Litecoin address: LNpcV2UByLEJDmD8rZqD3qHNvoQnTf6ujx

Go Bitcoin go! ;)

    Dresden, December 13th, 2013 — Torservers.net has been awarded $250,000 over two years by the Digital Defenders Partnership to strengthen and improve the Tor network, the anonymity system crucial to journalists and human rights defenders using the Internet.

Tor is free software and an open network that helps internet users to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. It is used by hundreds of thousands of daily users worldwide to secure their online communication, avoid tracking, and circumvent censorship.

Tor protects users by bouncing communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Torservers.net provides high bandwidth infrastructure for the Tor network since 2010. We have grown to 10 volunteer-run organizations in 8 countries. Torservers.net distributes donations and grants across independent organizations of IT security professionals, and helps build a sustainable network by teaching others how to run stable Tor infrastructure.

The Digital Defenders Partnership was established in 2012 to provide rapid response to threats to internet freedom. The Partnership aims at keeping the internet open and free from emerging threats, specifically in internet repressive and transitional environments. It also wants to increase and better coordinate emergency support for the internet’s critical users, such as bloggers, cyber activists, journalists and human rights defenders, whenever and wherever they are under threat.

Thanks to the newly awarded grant of $250,000 over two years, participating Torservers organizations will be able to sustain at least 3 Gbit/s of exit traffic, and 2000 fast and up to date bridges. Tor bridges are required in many countries with state-level censorship. 3 Gbit/s are 949 terabytes, almost a petabyte of user data, every single month, per direction.
Call for organizations

To strengthen the Tor network and prevent attackers, it is crucial to spread operation across as many groups as possible. Thanks to the Digital Defenders, Torservers.net can now extend its work and help less technical organizations with the setup and maintenance of Tor services. The Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) is the first civil society organization to join the Torservers program with its Cyber Arabs group. This collaboration allows Cyber Arabs to give stable and working Tor access to activists and journalists in the Arab world. If you are part of an organization interested in supporting Tor, please contact Torservers.net. They have various options available, and are happy to teach tech staff and journalists.

“Since we started Torservers.net a few years ago, Tor finally became fast enough to be used for all Internet communications” comments Moritz Bartl, co-founder of Torservers.net. “New people also join the Tor network every day. With the help of the Digital Defenders, we have the chance to make the network bigger, safer and more resilient to the benefit of everyone with the desires to protect their online activities from surveillance.”