Bitcoin node stopped finding peers via Tor

[wulfstan]

I've been running a Bitcoin Core full node on an Ubuntu server for years. Bitcoind connects via Tor to hide my Bitcoin usage from my ISP. In mid-December I suddenly stopped getting peers and I stopped downloading new blocks.

This is how my bitcoin.conf looks:

proxy=127.0.0.1:9050
listen=1
bind=127.0.0.1

As soon as I commented out the above lines, I found peers again and new blocks were successfully downloaded (but I'm no longer behind Tor).

Tor seems to be running fine on my server—I can still connect to a hidden service set up on the same machine, and the output of "curl --socks5 localhost:9050 --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 -s https://check.torproject.org/ | cat | grep -m 1 Congratulations | xargs" is 'Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor.'

I would like to resume using my node behind Tor. Any help is appreciated.

btw: I'm using Bitcoin Core 0.21.1.

[nc50lc]

Have you updated Tor recently?

You might get additional hints about the issue by adding --debug=tor arg when starting Bitcoin Core.
Then check your latest debug.log entries for lines containing "[tor]" tag.

For now, you can review section 2 or 3 of Bitcoin Core v0.21.1's Tor documentation: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v0.21.1/doc/tor.md

[flapduck]

0.21.1 is pretty old at this point, and there have been changes to how Tor support works in newer versions. Might be worth upgrading if you can.
Also check if your Tor service itself got updated recently. Sometimes Tor updates break the SOCKS interface or change default behaviors. Look at your Tor logs around mid-December when it stopped working.


Here's one thing to try: add   onlynet=onion   to your config so it's explicitly only looking for onion peers. And make sure you have   listenonion=1   set.
The debug.log with   -debug=tor   like nc50lc suggested should tell you what's actually failing.