If you love Bitcoin, you should help Tor – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Max Hillebrand, managing director of zkSNACKs and a Wasabi Wallet contributor.
After more than two years of thorough research, development and review, our team at Wasabi unleashed the Wasabi Wallet 2.0 into the wild. This upgrade included a number of improvements, and sought to finally make private use of Bitcoin easy and cheap. Specifically, the new Wasabi client is designed to be a more intense Tor user than before, now with even more Tor identities in parallel.
However, we received a harsh wake-up call right after the release when Tor experienced a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. When Tor is under a DDoS attack, CoinJoins are not as large and as frequent as they could be. It took three days for the first successful CoinJoin to complete, and even after many improvements to the Wasabi backend and client code, there are still occasional downtimes of hours, or even days.
Tragically, this is not just a problem facing Wasabi Wallet. Many other monumental projects in the Bitcoin space and beyond are affected by attacks on Tor — Bisq, Lightning Network, even Bitcoin full nodes are vulnerable to some degree. We’re all so dependent on Tor, and when it’s down, we’re all in big trouble.
Even more tragically, the Tor project is woefully underfunded, with only a handful of people working on the C-Tor client we all use today. Only a small team is actively working on a new client written in Rust, which significantly increases performance and fixes some critical bugs. However, there have not been enough funds to build and maintain the onion service support. Even projects like the denial-of-service defense appear to be struggling to secure meaningful long-term funding. There is very little status monitoring and event reporting, so projects that rely on Tor are often in the dark about what is actually going on. All this needs to be improved, fast!
Yes, running your own Tor relay node is a notable contribution to the network, but the more fundamental solution is throwing money at the problem. The Tor project needs a lot more funding, both one-off and recurring, to continue its vital work on private and censorship-resistant communications.
This is a call to action for anyone brave enough to part with a few stakes to secure a freer future. Donate to the Tor project, right now!
Additionally, if your project continuously relies on a stable and private Tor, and especially if you are currently affected by the ongoing denial of service attack, then please contact us to join our coordinated efforts to fix this specific issue as soon as possible.
This is a guest post by Max Hillebrand. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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