Quote from: astor on January 30, 2013, 06:07 amQuote from: SelfSovereignty on January 30, 2013, 02:52 amI don't understand. What's the advantage to this, other than flooding the Tor network with even more packets...? The network is only carrying about 60% of its advertised capacity:https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.pngEncrypting the data seems to be the rate-limiting step.That being said, the more users there are, the more diverse they are, and the more diverse the traffic, the safer and more anonymous everyone is. Bitcoin clients only download and upload about 100 MB a day (although that depends on how many connections they maintain), so this isn't like bittorrent traffic.You're absolutely right; this slipped my mind last night. Thanks.Quote from: astor on January 30, 2013, 06:07 amQuote from: SelfSovereignty on January 30, 2013, 02:52 amJust tunnel bitcoind through your Tor program and let it operate as usual: I'm not aware of anything an exit node can do that would harm you even when you're going through one to get to the next bitcoin node?That's true, there's really no advantage to connecting to a hidden service as opposed to a regular bitcoin node over Tor, and the connections tend to be much spottier.Quote from: SelfSovereignty on January 30, 2013, 02:52 amBitcoin nodes only maintain 8 active connections. I don't see how it's helpful to have other nodes trying to make incoming connections, when you can just make your 8 as outgoing and would start blocking the incoming ones regardless...?You can specify however many connections you want in bitcoin.conf:maxconnections=NYou can even specify the nodes you want to connect to (that's how connecting to onion addresses works, actually, you have to tell Tor to map private IP addresses to onion domains using the mapaddress feature and then tell bitcoin-qt to connect to those IP addresses).Anyway, I don't think there's a distinction between incoming and outgoing connections.Try it and see what happens. With the reference client (bitcoind, not sure about bitcoin-qt), it didn't work in 0.69, and that's the perspective I'm coming from. They have some bizarre definition for that value that I honestly didn't bother looking into much. Basically it doesn't mean what I assumed it meant, and when I saw that it's not a bug I just let it go. But the client won't ever maintain more than 8 connections. Given how unintuitive that is, personally I think it's a poor decision not to at least change the names of the options or something, but whatever. Not my project.