100 sats \ 3 replies \ @nullcount 4 Oct 2022 \ parent \ on: TOR friendly ISPs in the US? bitcoin
In Tor, urls ending in .onion are hidden services, no exit nodes are used when sending/receiving packets with .onions
LN nodes can advertise a .onion Tor V3 address for peers to connect.
Follow-up question: which types of TOR nodes are involved in the end-to-end .onion traffic between, say, Tor browser and a server hosting the .onion service?
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The browser runs a local proxy. The proxy sends a request through 3 hops (relays) before reaching the server running a .onion hidden service. The server's response goes backwards through those same 3 relays back to your browser.
Look into I2P, it's currently the #2 anonymity network and growing fast thanks to Tor reliability issues. In I2P, you must operate a relay/router in order to access the network. So it's more robust against DDoS since thousands of users aren't sharing a single relay.
You configure any browser to use your I2P router as a proxy (I2P daemon hosted on a separate computer ideally, or could run locally).
Requests are routed through 3 other routers before reaching the server hosting the .I2P site (eepSite). Then the server's response is sent back using 3 DIFFERENT routers. So, theoretically it's twice as secure as Tor since double the routing nodes would need to be compromised to de-anonymize a session. In practice, I2P probably isn't as anonymous because it has far fewer users and thus a smaller anonymity set. But this is starting to change. I2P also doesn't even support exit nodes, everything is a hidden service by default. There are ways to browse clearweb over I2P but it's more complex to set up yourself.
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Thanks!
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