Bitcoin Core 0.21 supports Tor V3

[notblox1]

Bitcoin Core 0.21 has interesting news release very important for privacy and that is support for Tor v3 addresses.
Anyone wanting to keep privacy and hide IP address can use this, and Tor addresses v3 are now longer.
Commit for Complete the BIP155 implementation and upgrade to TORv3:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19954

Release schedule for 0.21.0:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/18947

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[DaveF]

Cool news. Have really not been keeping up with it.

IIRC, 15-Oct-2021 is the release date for the TOR client that will disable V2.
Wonder if everyone is going to stick to that date. There seems to be a lot of support for it but how many old services are going to be sticking around.
On that same note, how many old cryptos that support TOR are going stop working on TOR because their wallet has not been updated in years.

-Dave

[DaveF]

If those services don't bother upgrade to v3 until v2 is removed, their service most likely will die anyway due to laziness.

It's not just laziness. There is a cost of time for the programmers for some back end changes. There is also the fact that you have to (or at least should) keep both up for a while even if your V2 is just a redirect to V3.
If you are running it yourself on older hardware you might have to find some money for an upgrade.
With the current state of the world economy some people might not do it or just wait till the last minute and discover that oh shit, there is other stuff that has to be done.

Just my view. Could be wrong, but hey.....look at IPV4. Yeah, not 100% the same but still.

-Dave

[notblox1]

IIRC, 15-Oct-2021 is the release date for the TOR client that will disable V2.
Wonder if everyone is going to stick to that date.

Tor v2 addresses are deprecated from last month and from October 2021 they will be disabled, so I think they will have enough time to update in time.

BIP155 also supports gossiping over the network and one node can tell other nodes that it is using Tor V3 hidden service to run BTC node.

This is release schedule for 0.21.0:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/18947

[DaveF]

v3 is available since late 2017 (https://blog.torproject.org/we-want-you-test-next-gen-onion-services) and v2 will be supported until late 2021. I know it's not easy task to perform upgrade, but there are 4 years interval.

https://bitnodes.io/nodes/

And yet even now close to 20% of the bitcoin network is running 18.x
And what 500+ nodes running 17.x

And for the most part updating your bitcoin client is a few mouse clicks.
I guess I just keep seeing so much outdated software out there that I have lost faith in people updating.

-Dave

[gmaxwell]

I guess I just keep seeing so much outdated software out there that I have lost faith in people updating.

Don't be so sure, a significant fraction of "nodes" are just lame sybils listening to other people's traffic in order to monitor users.  It seems that usually when someone makes one of these things that just have it emulate the nodes at the time and they seldom update them.

[pooya87]

https://bitnodes.io/nodes/

And yet even now close to 20% of the bitcoin network is running 18.x
And what 500+ nodes running 17.x

these are only reachable nodes (nodes that accept incoming connections with a listening socket) otherwise they only represent a small fraction of the total number of nodes (i believe around 10%).

[NotATether]

https://bitnodes.io/nodes/ unfortunately doesn't support filtered statistic (e.g. client distribution based on selected network/location) but at quick glance shows most nodes uses 0.19.x or newer.

I have had some success grouping the nodes by ASN number of their IP addresses, each ASN number indicates a data center. They look like ASN472548 for example, and it's possible to determine the location of the node based on the ASN number.

On bitnodes if you open the Networks tab you can see a grouping of all online nodes by network. The most online nodes are running on Tor network at 25.64% of the online bitcoin network, the second largest is running on Hetzner at 10.37%, the next four largest groups are evenly distributed between AWS, Digital Ocean, OVH and Linode at about 500/400 nodes each.

I think there are less Tor instances running than datacenter VMs at any given provider, because of the legal ramifications of running one. So pointing most of nodes at the Tor network might be bad for decentralization because there are a lot of underutilized hosting providers that only have a few full nodes on their datacenter. I'm running mine (it will have a long uptime) at Leaseweb NL which has just 29 nodes running on its entire datacenter.

We currently have no idea how many Tor nodes are running at a given hosting provider, because such statistics aren't available. But, with 8002 nodes not running on Tor, and 2759 nodes running on Tor, about a quarter of the network as I wrote above, one needs to think about how many exit nodes exist and are shared among the full nodes pointed to Tor.

According to the graph at https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html there are about 800 exit nodes (and according to this 100 of these spy on connections). So that's 3 full nodes sharing the same exit node. So we really only have about 8800 unique IPs running 24/7 on the bitcoin network.

I am not anti-Tor and this post should not be interpreted as such, but even though the bitcoin network doesn't transmit sensitive info, I'd trust a commercial provider not to inspect a random VM's network traffic more than a Tor node that might be a government agency honeypot in disguise. That's why I encourage people to run full nodes on less-used data centers.

[Leviathan.007]

If I'm not mistaking, tor V3 was available since 2017 but seeing bitcoin upgrading to support tor v3 on core 0.21 is pretty cool. However AFAIK, since there are still reachable bitcoin nodes using the old versions. Due to not having enough time or maybe better to say being lazy some won't  upgrade the nodes. But, after one year from now on October 2021, when the v2 becomes outdated and disabled, they will probably have to upgrade the nodes because one important goal of bitcoin is the privacy and if the fail to upgrade the nodes during this time due to the laziness, not having time, etc... probably they will die.