Ok, the first thing you should know is that Bitmessage connects to a set of IP addresses which act like Tor's directory authorities. That's where it gets info about other nodes. The problem is that there are only 300-400 nodes in the network, and we don't want our real IP addresses on that short list, especially since we're talking about using Bitmessage openly on this forum. Bitmessage will connect to these IP addresses immediately the first time you start it, before you can change proxy settings in the GUI, so we need to configure it to run over Tor before the first time we run it. 1. Install git and torsocks the normal way for your distro. The packages should be in your repos if you're using a Debian or Fedora based distro. Otherwise, torsocks source can be downloaded here: https://code.google.com/p/torsocks/ 2. torsocks is preconfigured to use Socks port 9050 with the Tor daemon. If you want to use TBB's Tor instead, open /etc/torsocks.conf and change   server_port = 9050 to 9150. 3. Clone the Bitmessage repo with git over Tor.   torsocks git clone https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage.git 4. Now we preconfigure it to run over Tor. Create this folder: ~/.PyBitmessage Put this in a file called keys.dat (in that folder) Yes, I know it's retarded that the configuration options are in the same file where the bitmessage keys are stored instead of a separate config file. And yes, I know it says messagesencrypted = false at the end. SS and I were looking into it, and that option seems to be unused. It may be there for some future feature. 5. Finally, start Bitmessage from the terminal with logging. Go to the folder where you cloned it and run:   python bitmessagemain.py | tee -a messages.log You will see a red circle in the status bar. It will change to yellow when you establish your first connection (may take 3-5 minutes). It won't turn green, because we're running it over Tor and can't accept connections. Leave Bitmessage running for a few hours, create some keys, send messages, play around with it to see what kind of error messages you get. I'll make a separate post on the kind of stuff I'm looking for. You can send a message to me at this address: BM-onsou9SN9ufFztCs8Cq6srFogEw5FdXAX