El Tor is a high-bandwidth Tor network fork, incentivized by the Bitcoin LN \ stacker news ~lightning

El Tor is a high-bandwidth Tor network fork, incentivized by the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Users can host El Tor relays and earn sats for sharing their bandwidth. The urgency for such a network has never been greater, especially in light of escalating privacy threats globally—from Brazil's VPN prohibition to the legal challenges faced by Telegram's Pavel Durov.

El Tor aims to transcend the existing boundaries of the Tor network and to scale beyond its current limitation. The project was inspired by the need for a private internet and the cypherpunk vision. BOLT 12 offers (with blinded paths) are used for privately paying relays. El Tor not only helps with censorship resistance but also enables efficient Lightning and Bitcoin node communication. A higher bandwidth and more reliable Tor network can also lead to future services being launched as hidden services, by default, instead of clearnet KYC'd servers.

Projects eltor: A fork of the Tor network that incorporates paid circuit handling and the EXTENDPAIDCIRCUIT RPC protocol. GitHub Repository eltord: The primary daemon orchestrating El Tor's operations, connecting to wallets, monitoring payment events, and managing RPC calls.

eltor-app: A VPN-like client application enabling connections to El Tor and remote wallets. It offers a user interface for relay management and hidden service creation.

Libraries libeltor: A Rust-based fork of libtor, designed to embed a fully operational eltord daemon within projects, with fallback capabilities for standard Tor network integration.

LNI: The Lightning Node Interface library provides a unified interface for connecting to CLN, LND, Phoenixd, and other implementations. It includes bindings for Rust, Android, iOS, and JavaScript (Node.js, React Native).

42 sats \ 1 reply \ @eltordev 7h

Greetings, here is the latest component digram for the El Tor Project.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Roll OP 5h

thks

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xIlmari 5h

Is it in any way cooperative with the original Tor? Like, can it route traffic through ordinary Tor nodes with only the entry and exit being aware of the paid nature of it? Or does the entire circuit need to be El Tor and every hop gets paid for its share of work routing the traffic?

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @eltordev 41m

El Tor and Tor are two separate networks (for many technical reasons) but we are architecting the El Tor daemon (eltord) and VPN-like apps (eltor-app) to detect what network you are attempting to route thru.

For instance, if you are trying to access your existing start9 that runs on the existing Tor network it will route thru a free circuit (since the introductory and rendezvous nodes are on the original Tor network).

If you are trying to route to a hidden service on El Tor (or even just a clearnet website) it will detect that you configured a wallet and will look up paid relays and their rates via the El Tor Directory Authorities. Then it will build a paid circuit.

The digram above shows much of this logic occurring in the SOCK5 load balancer/proxy in eltord. The goal is to create a modular daemon that could run in Start9, Umbrel, Mobile Apps, etc... and be a drop in replace for Tor.