Bitcoin and TOR

[doobadoo]

I tried running Bitcoin over TOR.  I also took a look at my net traffic with a snooping app.  What i see is a lot of traffic that gets routed over TOR, most likely the p2p stuff including the txs.  However, according to the snitch app and my TOR logs, Bitcoin makes some clearnet connections.  Probably related to peer discovery...  Here is what i pull from Vidalia's messages:

[Mon Jun 18 XXXX 2012] Potentially Dangerous Connection! - One of your applications established a connection through Tor to "98.151.200.160:8333" using a protocol that may leak information about your destination. Please ensure you configure your applications to use only SOCKS4a or SOCKS5 with remote hostname resolution.

My guess is that there is some kind of dns lookup its doing, again probably for peer discovery.

My question is:  has TOR usage been fully implemented.  In the event that some government tries to firewall or block out BTC, TOR may be the only way folks in an affected jurisdiction may be able to access the network. 

Just curious as to whether or not this is the case.

-doob

[kokjo]

peer discovery is done by dns seeds. if you want to disable peer discovery use -addnode to bitcoind.

the warning will still show in tor, because bitcoin don't connect to dns addresses but "raw" ips, and therefor does not happen a dns lookup when connecting to a new peer found in the network. but when you pass an ip to tor, tor assumes that the application using it, does dns lookup besides tor, and spews a warning.

[Pieter Wuille]

We're very close to adding much improved Tor support to Bitcoin, so it will most likely be in 0.7.0.

Among other things:

• Support for running as and connecting to Bitcoin hidden services
• Peer exchange of Bitcoin hidden services
• Non-leaking DNS seeding via proxy

[byronbb]

I tried to run the client over tor for a while but my connections were very low and eventually reduced to 1 or 2.

[stepkrav]

We're very close to adding much improved Tor support to Bitcoin, so it will most likely be in 0.7.0.

Among other things:

• Support for running as and connecting to Bitcoin hidden services
• Peer exchange of Bitcoin hidden services
• Non-leaking DNS seeding via proxy

thanks for this.
Anyway, i've just tried bitcoin over Tor and works pretty well.

[ErebusBat]

We're very close to adding much improved Tor support to Bitcoin, so it will most likely be in 0.7.0.

Among other things:

• Support for running as and connecting to Bitcoin hidden services
• Peer exchange of Bitcoin hidden services
• Non-leaking DNS seeding via proxy

thanks for this.
Anyway, i've just tried bitcoin over Tor and works pretty well.

Is there a guide for this?

[Pieter Wuille]

Is there a guide for this?

doc/Tor.txt in the source tree

[ErebusBat]

Is there a guide for this?

doc/Tor.txt in the source tree

Very interesting, thank you!

[justusranvier]

If anyone wants to test their ability to connect to a hidden service they can use this one: cciyjmmmmbg2mri3.onion