Trying to connect node throught Tor but cannot find peers

[cellard]

Im trying to connect my Bitcoin core full node through Tor but I have been waiting for 15 minutes and I still have 0 peers.

I clicked on the "Connect throught SOCKS5 proxy (default proxy)" checkbox and also clicked on the "Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services:"

then restarted the client with these boxes checked and a Tor Browser window opened (I think this was needed) but I cannot see any peers. Im doing something wrong?

The proxy settings are the default ones (127.0.0.1:9050)

[1714175624]

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[science23]

have a look here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Setting_up_a_Tor_hidden_service

regards,

science

[Anti-Cen]

I use to love Tor and was running a program on a dedicated machine to screen scrape data from certain sites and never used
browsers on the machine and just connected to it now and then with remote desktop to make sure things were running smooth.

Well cast your mind back to the start of the recent climb in BTC prices and tie that in to the WannaCry virus because thats what
the machine picked up and apart from my program using sockets to connect to the valindi Tor client code nothing else was running
on the machine and yes the ransom-ware wanted paying in BTC for a decryption key.

THIS IS THE POINT WHERE ABUSE STARTS FLYING MY WAY

Most of the time I keep quite about this but since someone has mentioned it I thought you should read the new that's only a day old
https://www.rt.com/usa/420219-tor-us-government-funded-bbg/

Ask yourself OP if I needed to make this up and do search my old posts if you think that I have just made this up.

[cellard]

have a look here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Setting_up_a_Tor_hidden_service

regards,

science

The bitcoin wiki is unfortunately very outdated.

I use to love Tor and was running a program on a dedicated machine to screen scrape data from certain sites and never used
browsers on the machine and just connected to it now and then with remote desktop to make sure things were running smooth.

Well cast your mind back to the start of the recent climb in BTC prices and tie that in to the WannaCry virus because thats what
the machine picked up and apart from my program using sockets to connect to the valindi Tor client code nothing else was running
on the machine and yes the ransom-ware wanted paying in BTC for a decryption key.

THIS IS THE POINT WHERE ABUSE STARTS FLYING MY WAY

Most of the time I keep quite about this but since someone has mentioned it I thought you should read the new that's only a day old
https://www.rt.com/usa/420219-tor-us-government-funded-bbg/

Ask yourself OP if I needed to make this up and do search my old posts if you think that I have just made this up.

Sorry but I don't quite understand your post. Are you saying that Tor Browser software installed WannaCry virus on your computer? can you give more details? I just don't get it, how that's even possible?

I use Tor to bypass proxies because I don't feel like paying an VPN etc, I have used for years and I've never heard anything like that...

About the US funding Tor project... yes rather strange, but at the end of the day they use Tor too. I've always heard conspiracy theories like that but no proof of anything. If it's open source, who cares who is funding it?

[xdrpx]

I'm running a Tor full-node using Bitcoin core 0.16.0 and here's how I've set it up so far and it works fine with incoming connections as well:

1) I have tor commandline installed on my Manjaro Arch Linux [I believe I've setup this on Windows 10 once too via command line and the procedure is almost simlar]
2) I've created a TOR hidden service in /etc/tor/torrc:

Code:

HiddenServiceDir /home/yourlinuxusername/path/to/your/torhiddenservicedirectory
HiddenServicePort 8333 127.0.0.1:8333
ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1
CookieAuthFileGroupReadable 1

3) Go to your Tor hidden service directory [/home/yourlinuxusername/path/to/your/torhiddenservicedirectory] and open the hostname file. In this you'll find the .onion domain hostname that Tor has generated for you. You can use a tor name generator [something like vanity gen for Bitcoin addresses to customize your Tor address]

3) Restart  / start TOR:

Code:

service tor restart or
systemctl restart tor

To start tor just type this in command line:

Code:

tor

4) Configure Bitcoin Core:
My Bitcoin.conf configuration file information:

Code:

unpn=0
maxconnections= 50
rpcuser=<yourrpcuser>
rpcpassword=<yourrpcpassword>
listen=1 
externalip=<yourtordomain.onion>

5) Start Bitcoin Core [Bitcoin QT in my case]: Go to Settings > Options > Network > Check allow incoming connections if you need to > Check to use SOCKS5 proxy and input 127.0.0.1 and 9050 as port.

Now you can restart Bitcoin core if you want to and you should see peers and other nodes connecting to you soon. Let me know if you still need any further help setting this up.

[nullius]

Im trying to connect my Bitcoin core full node through Tor but I have been waiting for 15 minutes and I still have 0 peers.

I clicked on the "Connect throught SOCKS5 proxy (default proxy)" checkbox and also clicked on the "Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services:"

then restarted the client with these boxes checked and a Tor Browser window opened (I think this was needed) but I cannot see any peers. Im doing something wrong?

The proxy settings are the default ones (127.0.0.1:9050)

So, you are trying to use the bundled Tor from Tor Browser rather than a dedicated Tor daemon?  This is not recommended.

IIRC, the default TCP port for Tor Browser’s Tor’s SOCKSPort is 127.0.0.1:9150, which explains why Bitcoin could not connect to port 9050.  On Linux, at least, recent versions of Tor Browser may even use a UNIX domain socket rather than a TCP socket.  But I’m not even sure what it does by default, since I use Tor Browser with an external Tor daemon on a network-isolating gateway.  I would need to search—I recommend that you do so, if you really want to use Tor Browser’s Tor.

If you want to add another SOCKSPort to Tor Browser, look for Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/torrc.  See the Tor manual page for documentation of SOCKSPort.  Be aware that this will probably (?) be wiped out when you upgrade Tor Browser.

It is strongly recommended that you set up a separate Tor daemon for your Bitcoin.  I recommend doing so on a gateway which isolates the internal network; this affirmatively prevents all leaks of your “real” IP address, whether malicious or accidental.  Many applications leak horribly, doing direct DNS lookups even when they purport to accept SOCKS proxy settings.  You can set up a Tor gateway on a cheap computer with two Ethernet ports, or using VMs within the same physical machine.  On FreeBSD, the jail subsystem provides a lightweight means to achieve this.  N.b. that if you use a separate Tor daemon with Tor Browser, it requires some muttered incantations to disable Tor Browser’s bundled Tor; and you must do this to avoid “Tor-over-Tor”, which will harm your anonymity as well as killing performance.

[cellard]

Do I need to run a hidden service? Isn't this how people has gotten randomly raided by the Feds? or is it running a Tor node? Honestly I may give up and just stick to the VPN. I thought it was as easy as opening the Tor Browser then Bitcoin QT with the proxy boxes checked and you are set, but it seems this can lead to IP leaks and so on...

Nullius do you have a step by step tutorial of what you are talking about? Otherwise I most likely screw up in the process, I have no idea how to go about that.

[Anti-Cen]

Sorry but I don't quite understand your post. Are you saying that Tor Browser software installed WannaCry virus on your computer? can you give more details? I just don't get it, how that's even possible?

I was using vidalia.exe that comes with a proxy server (privoxy.exe) directly from win-sockets within my code to pull pages from
all over the internet and I am sure many of these site would be pushing viruses that rely on javascript and browser exploits but thats
not going to infect a machine that's not browsing and is simply parsing the HTML from the pages and nothing else was even running
on the machine because it was dedicated to this simple task when it picked up WannaCry

No I am not 100% sure it must had been Tor itself but I would say 99% sure this is what happened

My reason for scanning the internet via Tor was to count the number of active web-sites in use that are not just
domain parked or are using 302 redirects back to central servers and part of the process was fooling google search to
give up a few of it's secrets or else they cut you off if you do too many searches.

Believe me I was a big time fan of Tor before this happened, nice tool in the box but look around and you will find
other cracks that people are talking about and also note that the number of exit nodes always stays at around 300
and the other draw back is they have all become well known and blocked by most sites.

I ran Tor once as an exit node and it got little to no traffic and I know this because I was running my own version of
Wireshark on the machine so again I say that all is not as it seems.

[Anti-Cen]

Many applications leak horribly, doing direct DNS lookups even when they purport to accept SOCKS proxy settings

Yes and they are all working for big money and that includes Firefox plus you have STUN servers and it's so bad that even
if the HTML in the browser uses something like

<img src='http://google2.com' />

Then the browser forces the request to be sent out as HTTPS on port 443 for google.
(I needed to fake google advert tracking here)

I run code that scans and replaces all the urls in .exe's and Dlls and google is used as Constance  
all over the place and not just in pak files.

With Chrome you can write browser extensions yourself like "Add-Blocks" but the framework does not call
your J-Script functions on some of the "google call" home requests so your code cannot block them.

Microsoft with it's ETC/Host file won't block some domains when you set them to 127.0.0.1 and
has basically turned into a remote terminal for the NSA/CIA.

[cellard]

So if you don't like Tor, what else do you recommend? what's there besides a decent VPN? any services you recommend?

I just don't like the idea of not using something when broadcasting a transaction. You are making a transaction through your real IP, this doesn't seem too safe. But then again Tor doesn't seem too safe too from what im reading, I also don't want to host anything that could incriminate me somehow, I've read people running Tor nodes that never did anything wrong, ended up raided somehow.. no thanks. Could this happen if you need to host your own hidden service too? And if using Tor Browser method isn't safe, why they don't mention this in Bitcoin Core documentation? they only talk about this method.

Isn't Electrum safer than using a full node with your real IP? I mean the transaction in Electrum goes through some server, and not your IP directly.. it's a similar model to VPN where you would need to trust that whoever running the SPV server is not selling logs.

Im not doing anything ilegal btw, I just don't like the idea of people having your real IP when you are transacting.

[ranochigo]

I just don't like the idea of not using something when broadcasting a transaction. You are making a transaction through your real IP, this doesn't seem too safe. But then again Tor doesn't seem too safe too from what im reading, I also don't want to host anything that could incriminate me somehow, I've read people running Tor nodes that never did anything wrong, ended up raided somehow.. no thanks. Could this happen if you need to host your own hidden service too?

Tor works by using relay nodes and exit nodes. Exit nodes are the ones responsible for getting your data relayed to the clear web. Relay nodes just bounce the data within the network and they are pretty safe since they aren't responsible for relaying information to the clearweb.

Isn't Electrum safer than using a full node with your real IP? I mean the transaction in Electrum goes through some server, and not your IP directly.. it's a similar model to VPN where you would need to trust that whoever running the SPV server is not selling logs.

Im not doing anything ilegal btw, I just don't like the idea of people having your real IP when you are transacting.

Bitcoin Core is by far the best for privacy. The way Electrum client works is that they send your addresses to an Electrum server that is run by the community. This could expose your privacy quite significantly. Bitcoin Core doesn't do this since they store the whole blockchain. Peers would not know who sent the transaction when using Bitcoin Core. The peers would only know that you've relayed a transaction but they wouldn't know who sent the transaction.

[cellard]

Sorry but I don't quite understand your post. Are you saying that Tor Browser software installed WannaCry virus on your computer? can you give more details? I just don't get it, how that's even possible?

I was using vidalia.exe that comes with a proxy server (privoxy.exe) directly from win-sockets within my code to pull pages from
all over the internet and I am sure many of these site would be pushing viruses that rely on javascript and browser exploits but thats
not going to infect a machine that's not browsing and is simply parsing the HTML from the pages and nothing else was even running
on the machine because it was dedicated to this simple task when it picked up WannaCry

No I am not 100% sure it must had been Tor itself but I would say 99% sure this is what happened

My reason for scanning the internet via Tor was to count the number of active web-sites in use that are not just
domain parked or are using 302 redirects back to central servers and part of the process was fooling google search to
give up a few of it's secrets or else they cut you off if you do too many searches.

Believe me I was a big time fan of Tor before this happened, nice tool in the box but look around and you will find
other cracks that people are talking about and also note that the number of exit nodes always stays at around 300
and the other draw back is they have all become well known and blocked by most sites.

I ran Tor once as an exit node and it got little to no traffic and I know this because I was running my own version of
Wireshark on the machine so again I say that all is not as it seems.

Isn't vidalia very outdated? I haven't heard about that since ancient versions of Tor..

How about using Tails? Wouldn't the transactions made through Bitcoin Core be relayed through Tor by default without needing to do anything?

I just don't like the idea of not using something when broadcasting a transaction. You are making a transaction through your real IP, this doesn't seem too safe. But then again Tor doesn't seem too safe too from what im reading, I also don't want to host anything that could incriminate me somehow, I've read people running Tor nodes that never did anything wrong, ended up raided somehow.. no thanks. Could this happen if you need to host your own hidden service too?

Tor works by using relay nodes and exit nodes. Exit nodes are the ones responsible for getting your data relayed to the clear web. Relay nodes just bounce the data within the network and they are pretty safe since they aren't responsible for relaying information to the clearweb.

Isn't Electrum safer than using a full node with your real IP? I mean the transaction in Electrum goes through some server, and not your IP directly.. it's a similar model to VPN where you would need to trust that whoever running the SPV server is not selling logs.

Im not doing anything ilegal btw, I just don't like the idea of people having your real IP when you are transacting.

Bitcoin Core is by far the best for privacy. The way Electrum client works is that they send your addresses to an Electrum server that is run by the community. This could expose your privacy quite significantly. Bitcoin Core doesn't do this since they store the whole blockchain. Peers would not know who sent the transaction when using Bitcoin Core. The peers would only know that you've relayed a transaction but they wouldn't know who sent the transaction.

I know, I thought that you could somehow trace it if you didn't use a proxy and so relaying throught a server (Electrum) would be more private than clearnet full node transaction but it seems it's safe:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/56682/understanding-ip-address-tracing-via-bitcoin-transaction

I find that claim (tracing the IP address of a transaction) highly suspect as transactions don't have an IP address associated with them. Once a transaction has been broadcast, it is incredibly difficult to figure out what IP address first sent the address. To do so requires that you have a connection to every single node and wallet and determine the IP address by seeing which node first broadcast a transaction. Otherwise you cannot figure out what IP address a transaction originated from.

The person you met may have meant that he traced the Bitcoin addresses in a transaction to figure out who spent created the transaction. That is far easier to do and far less expensive as you only need a copy of the blockchain to do so.

Still, would be cool to easily transact through Tor safely. If I do what nullius said, I don't need to fear any random raids right?

[ranochigo]

How about using Tails? Wouldn't the transactions made through Bitcoin Core be relayed through Tor by default without needing to do anything?

Yes. But the setup process could be more complicated. Tails is made to be a live CD and it doesn't come with Bitcoin Core by default, but it does come with Electrum. Why don't you try setting it up on your normal computer instead of trying to install another OS completely?

Personally, I wouldn't really use Tor for everything. There is a known list of exit nodes and some sites tend to block those IPs completely. I don't think there is any way for the user to allow the traffic to bypass Tor. It's a good way to preserve anonymity however.

[cellard]

How about using Tails? Wouldn't the transactions made through Bitcoin Core be relayed through Tor by default without needing to do anything?

Yes. But the setup process could be more complicated. Tails is made to be a live CD and it doesn't come with Bitcoin Core by default, but it does come with Electrum. Why don't you try setting it up on your normal computer instead of trying to install another OS completely?

Personally, I wouldn't really use Tor for everything. There is a known list of exit nodes and some sites tend to block those IPs completely. I don't think there is any way for the user to allow the traffic to bypass Tor. It's a good way to preserve anonymity however.

I thought about a setup in which it looks like this: Your IP -> Tor node IP -> VPN IP, -> internet, this way, the sites see the VPN IP but your traffic still is routed throught Tor for an extra layer of protection, but I have read that this is not a good idea for some reason. In the Tails website for instance, they say not to do this:

https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/vpn_support/

And yes I don't use Tor for everything... mostly only for this site to not get doxed by scammers.

I think I will not bother. I think I read achow saying how your node will not reveal your IP in a transaction, even if you aren't using anything. I assume only nodes can see your real IP, and I don't run a 24/7 node so it's not that important.

[besstat]

And I also connected through the SOCKS5 proxy server and clicked "Use a separate SOCKS5 proxy to access peers through hidden Tor services