Full Node VPN+Tor

[BlackHatCoiner]

If you're afraid of being Tor-censored, you better leave the place altogether. I know that might sound nuts, but if you think about it, you're living under a very authoritarian regime. Censoring people who use Tor is the practice of "everyone guilty until proven innocent". I'd absolutely not want to live and make a family in such country.

You can also download Tor Browser by email message

You should use a private email server, before that becomes censored. Also, you could perhaps use the free wifi of cafeterias to get into torproject.org?

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[ranochigo]

You have to keep in mind that your ISP may has a list of Tor Bridges and if you connect one of them, they'l ltag you. In order to hide your Tor usage, you have to use unknown and/or very secret bridge. This Bridge shouldn't be used only by you but it should be used by some other people too but it should be in a group secretly, not an easy task but possible. One can set up an obfs4 bridge on VPS and share it with some friends who won't make it publicly available on Reddit and social networks.
Btw there is a short normal (okayish) WIKI if anyone is interested: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/doc/TorPlusVPN

I'm not really sure what is the emphasis on being tagged. Traffic analysis is possible even if you wrap it within a VPN connection, and if your government is willing to tag a Tor connection, then you should assume that they don't care about the false positives as well. You should assume that you are being watched regardless.

Bridges should only be used to evade but not hide your connections. That is futile against governments with tons of resources to track you down. In that case, then running a private bridge wouldn't be the most cost effective idea.

[Synchronice]

If you're afraid of being Tor-censored, you better leave the place altogether. I know that might sound nuts, but if you think about it, you're living under a very authoritarian regime. Censoring people who use Tor is the practice of "everyone guilty until proven innocent". I'd absolutely not want to live and make a family in such country.

You can also download Tor Browser by email message

You should use a private email server, before that becomes censored. Also, you could perhaps use the free wifi of cafeterias to get into torproject.org?

I am not saying that someone will arrest you for using Tor or you will ever experience any trouble by using Tor. But I think if you want to keep your privacy protected, you shouldn't let them know that you are protecting your privacy. Sounds confusing? The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison. In other words, if you publicly use Tor, they know you are either doing something wrong or are trying to protect your privacy. Gotcha, we know you are not an ordinary user, we will keep an eye on you, in case something bad happens.
These are my thoughts, that's why I think absolutely everyone should try to keep it secret from their ISP that they use Tor.

[BlackHatCoiner]

But I think if you want to keep your privacy protected, you shouldn't let them know that you are protecting your privacy.

Ideally, you never reveal that you're safeguarding your privacy. Achieving this demands an astonishing amount of resources, involving the scrutiny of internet activities for the majority of the population within a surveillance state, just to create an appearance of privacy protection. If you fail to take such measures, you'll be forced to relinquish your privacy and accept constant surveillance.

Gotcha, we know you are not an ordinary user, we will keep an eye on you, in case something bad happens.

That's good, relatively to the example of being Tor-censored (and that's basically what the rest of the countries do). Okay, you want to be anonymous, you're put in a suspect list (if there's any such thing anyway). That is orders of magnitude different than prohibiting the access on Tor by default, because you're living under a "guilty until proven innocent" state; essentially, being guilty for not being monitored.

[n0nce]

I wanted to use the node privately via LAN.
VPN router
Tor

My fear is that my IP appears somewhere, I would like to remain as anonymous as possible.

If you just want to connect to your node / machine in your local network privately, do feel free to use Tor.
Light wallets typically utilize the "Electrum server" (popularized by the wallet with the same name) protocol to accomplish that. My full node guide actually shows how to configure the Electrum server software (in my case electrs) to run through Tor, such that you don't have to VPN into your local network or open any ports on your router.

why shouldn't you also use VPN as an additional option?

You can absolutely set up a VPN server on your router and use that to log into your local network and access software that runs only locally. In fact, that may be more secure than opening up your Electrum server to the whole of the onion network.
However, for most users this is too complicated and their networking hardware often does not have such features.

I want to do everything right, these are not silly questions for me, I'd rather ask than make any mistakes later
you are not forced to answer, you can just ignore my posts if it annoys you

I think you asked some very valid questions in this thread.


Do note that the guide I linked above, runs Bitcoin Core in clearnet mode. You will need to change only that though, everything else is already Tor-only.