Tor Node issues

[calkob]

Hi

quick question, obviously a Tor node can have incoming connections,  so how does an inbound node find my node? (ie: ip address)

[DaveF]

Here you go:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Setting_up_a_Tor_hidden_service

There are a few people on the forum who have done it, you can probably ping out to them for help too.
How much experience do you have with Tor in general?

-Dave

[jackg]

The essentials on any node finding (clearnet or tor):
1. When you start your node for the first time, it comes with a list of trusted nodes that are expected to be run (there are also separate services to set this yourself if it doesn't happen).
2. You send this node your IP and tell it you are a node on the network
3. I think it generally starts trying to send you blocks but will also give you a tip of 'peers' which is a list of addresses you can use in order to access the network. It can send anywhere from 1 to 1000 peers for you to try to connect to (under normal rules).


For the tor stuff (Tor is The Onion Route, it's onion routing).

What occurs in onion routing is you get the same names as before but instead of IPs, you're getting the dot onion names.
With onion routing, you send encrypted packets. If you want to communicate with someone, you have the first node tell you it can get a connection through to the second node (and the rest of the nodes do the same after that) and you then send an encrypted packet with all of their keys.
If you're using TOR and tor hidden service as a website, your packet takes 6 hops (or it used to).

Your original data is encrypted ~6 times between you and the final destination, no one along the route can read what you're sending unless you own half of the hops and then you can work out who you're communicating with still.