Bitcoin Forum

So I'm running a tor relay node from home for a while and was tempted to be an exit node.
You might be familiar with the raid stories from people running an exit node. (http://www.zdnet.com/article/austrian-man-raided-for-operating-tor-exit-node/)
Now I know port 80 and 443 are popular exit ports, but what would be the risk of running a bitcoin exit node?
I already activated my node on 8332-8333 to be an exit but did not have any traffic on it yet afaics.

What risk do I take other than possible bandwidth complains from my ISP?
I mean, I also have free 2.4 an 5 GHz Wifi enabled on my router (limited bandwidth and no access to LAN)

You have the risk of having illegal activity being routed through your node and could have your ISP attempt to shut you down, police come and seize or question, or requests from police to release data even though you don't have it. However, the Tor Project does have legal advice for these situations and you can always contact the EFF for legal help also.

You might also have the risk of people trying to attack your computer in order to damage the Tor network. I would advise using a secure OS such as Whonix.

I'm trying to figure out how the two notions are related.  Your topic says "bitcoin tor exit node" which I guess means "a bitcoin node and a tor exit node on the same computer".  Is that right?  Your post (and the first reply to it) seem to be talking about the risks of running a tor exit node.  I guess I just can't figure out how running the bitcoin node on the same computer is related (except that it's going to use a lot of memory and bandwidth on that computer).  Help me out.

What traffic can be routed through my node other than bitcoin if I'm only an exit for ports 8332 and 8333?
I know, people could try to connect to a webserver listening at 8333 though my node and send threats and do illegal activity, but the chance of a webserver running at 8333 is extremely small.
For example, it's not possible to threat someone by email, webmail or forum through my node with standard ports. Am I right?

What illegal bitcoin traffic could be routed through my node?

It is running on a google TV stick booted with linaro linux. It's the only thing running on that device.

It is basically a tor relay node. But the only ports I marked as an exit are 8332 and 8333.
You can be an exit for various protocols (ports) but I only chose to be a bitcoin exit node because the risks of being an exit node for ports 80, 443, 25 and a bunch of others.

Sorry, I misunderstood the OP, I thought that you were running an exit node that had the standard ports open.

There shouldn't be anything illegal coming through since those ports are specialized and unused except for Bitcoin.

I believe that the OP is saying that he wants to run a Tor exit node that caters specifically to Bitcoin nodes because it only has ports 8332 and 8333 open.

I got it now.  Your goal is that if someone wants to use bitcoin over TOR, they can exit at your node.  You aren't running bitcoin on this computer, you're just allowing traffic to exit.  I think I understand now and sorry for the confusion.  :)

I'm not too clear on the use case for that, because if I want to send a transaction anonymously, can't I just use a tor http connection to broadcast the transaction on, say, blockchain.info's public api?

Yep, that's it.

No probs, could have been my non native english style of writing ;-)


Probably you could, but life is all about choices ;-)

And mainly I'm running these ports as an exit because I hope to get marked as an exit node (without having much extra risk) and therefor have a chance of collecting more bitcoins because I'm listed at oniontip (https://oniontip.com/#?exit_filter=all_relays&links&sort=cw&sort_reverse&country=+)
Running the node (with a very shitty connection) as a relay for a few months didn't get me *any* satoshis (altough there were donations to others).
I hope to increase my chances by getting the exit flag and increasing my bandwidth a bit.

Like I said, it running on a spare google TV stick and is consuming a few watts (likely less than 5 watt)
I would love to have some satoshis collected this way, only for the fun of it.

bc.i is a centralised service, bound to disappear at some point in the (maybe distant) future. We shouldn't rely on centralised services, as convenient as they may be. Better to sendrawtransaction to your nearest onion node.



In order to be eligible for the Exit flag, you need to be an exit for at least 2 ports among 80, 443 and 6667. You're not going to get Exit by being an exit for bitcoin only. This doesn't mean, though, that your exit ports will remain unused. It only means that clients won't be preemptively opening circuits through your node—they will only do when 8333 is requested, and your node is chosen among the possible alternatives.

Well, there goes my dream :D  lol
But I'll probably let those ports running as an exit anyway.
Thanks for the info.

You will still be a tor node, and that will help the tor network.

As went mine back in the day :P.



Please do. There is a shortage of exits, and not all of them allow 8333. Thank you!

Thanks, I think I understand the use-case and the motivation now.  I may actually look into that oniontip link, I use tor regularly for http but I haven't considered looking into running a tor node myself.  Cheers, guys!

One thing has stopped me and it's the kinda traffic you get through tor.  If you are a exit node sadly a lot abuse it for things you don't want associated with.

If you have a static IP address I would not do it as it might get you flagged all over.    If dynamic IP then you can change it so not as big as deal.

So it could make your web browsing a pain.  And that does not even talk about possible legal issues if they do something "bad" through your exit node.

I have only a dynamic IP, but you make a good point to think twice.  I believe in freedom but there are definitely some things that go down on the internet that I wouldn't want to be associated with.  I'll think about this before acting.   Cheers!

Except that this thread is all about being an exit to the bitcoin port only. The chances that nasty traffic goes directed to 8333 are pretty much nil.



I don't think this makes a difference. Your ISP knows who you are anyway.

I don't mean to take away from idea of a bitcoin through tor it's a interesting idea.  I'm all for spreading the network.

And I appolgize if it did not come out right.   I mean for example if you have a static IP and it's a exit node and some one spams, or does boting with google.   It would be a pain to have to type capatcha all the time on google if your node was used for bad.  Being flagged from sites as a bad IP. 

But I guess you are right if no one put's other traffic through that port it would not matter. And of course ISP i agree no matter what IP they have a record.

In my experience, I have to type in a captcha to use google whenever I'm browsing with TOR.   You don't have to be doing bad stuff to be forced by google to solve a captcha.  Sorry in advance if I misunderstood you somewhere.

The reason is the IP's have been flagged by google.   If your IP is not flagged you can search without needing to do a capatcha.   Granted running tor does not mean it will happen. (espically this tor will be just bitcoin traffic it sounds like).

This is what might happen if "bad traffic" is sent to your exit node - https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640?hl=en

Oh, right, I see what you mean.  If you got flagged while running an exit node then you might have to deal with those captchas even while browing not through tor, because your IP would be tor-marked.  Sorry, I think my brain is only running on half-speed today.  :)

running exit nodes are a hassle since some sites block tor users from browsing their site. once you run a exit node, you will be flagged by a list of database and it is easy for webowners to flag your IPs.

Not a problem :) I probley didn't explain it well was part of it.  But that is the problem if you have a static IP if that happens it's a pain to get new IP so things such as google captcha on each search would make your regular browsing a pain.

In perfect world it would be used for things such as china blocked this site, so allow people there to view this site.  But sadly a lot of bad traffic goes through tor.   

Right, and I'm also of the mindset that what I think is or isn't bad isn't an absolute.  For example, presumably, the government censors in china think that the traffic that skips their censorship is "bad".  So I admit a lot of grey area and say that freedom is better than censorship.  However, even I disagree strongly with some stuff, and anyway...

True, and that's why I decided to be an exit for bitcoin only. I won't get the exit flag for that and my exit traffic will not easily be abused.

It's honestly sad.  I have went to quite a few computer security conferences.  Even listened to some of the TOR team speak.  They had a great idea to help out people, and was about everyone having equal access to the internet in an anomyous fashion.  If a country or isp blocking a legitmate site then it's goal was to allow access.

But slowly in my opinion it degraded.  The amount of bad traffic just went up and up, and the network got slower and slower.   I have not used it in over a year so it cold have changed.   But the being flagged is a real worry with being a exit node.

It's still not fast, but it's useable.  I do so quite often.  I honestly think that tor is a bit like bitcoin---empowering.  Some people will use that power for evil, some for good, but overall I see the empowerment as a good thing.  I try to support tor but I don't have enough bandwidth myself to actually run a node.  Although the idea in the OP of just running bitcoin ports is quite interesting---it got me reading up on the tor docs and whatnot.  Thanks OP!

You're welcome  :)
Like I said, I run tor on a very low end machine.
Therefore it's running linaro linux.
One downside is that I can't install a recent version of bitcoin because there is no pre compiled version for linaro.
For the moment I lack the skills to compile it myself and be sure it works good. Otherwise I would have ran a hidden bitcoin node, something which is even more needed than a bitcoin exit node in my opinion.

So, if you're really interested in tor and bitcoin you could consider to run this instead. Bitcoin also consumes not so much bandwidth.

I'm sorta surprised you can't run one of the pre-compiled binaries for another distro and just use LD_LIBRARY_PATH or something like that to fix up any missing dynamic links (IE, where libraries are in the wrong locations).  I've never used linaro so I have no idea, really.   Complining bitcoin is usually pretty easy on linux (but I don't know the package manager on linaro), presumably you can get gnu make and g++ and whatnot, then just run configure and make.