Tor is Being Attacked, and Bitcoiners Must Respond

Tor is failing to fight against denial-of-service assaults due to a lack of funding, putting Bitcoin initiatives in danger.

Wasabi’s team has released Wasabi Wallet 2.0 after more than two years of exhaustive study, development, and evaluation. This update contained various enhancements designed to make the private usage of Bitcoin eventually simple and inexpensive. Specifically, the new Wasabi client is meant to be a more intensive Tor user than in the past, with even more Tor identities running simultaneously.

However, immediately after its release, Tor underwent a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault, which was a rude awakening. When Tor is under a DDoS assault, the size and frequency of CoinJoins are reduced. Even after several enhancements to the Wasabi backend and client code, there are still rare downtimes lasting several hours or even days.

The tragedy is that this is not a problem exclusive to Wasabi Wallet. Many other major Bitcoin-related and non-Bitcoin-related projects are susceptible to Tor assaults, including Bisq, Lightning Network, and Bitcoin full nodes. When Tor is unavailable, we are all in a great deal of trouble.

Even more tragically, the Tor project is grossly underfunded, with just a handful of individuals working on the C-Tor client we all use today. A small team is busy developing a new Rust-based client that significantly improves speed and addresses important problems.

However, insufficient money has prevented the construction and maintenance of onion service support. Even efforts such as denial-of-service defences seem to have difficulty securing significant long-term financing. Due to the lack of status monitoring and event reporting, projects that depend on Tor are often in the dark about what is occurring. All of this must be improved immediately!

Yes, having your own Tor relay node is a significant contribution to the network, but throwing money at the issue is the more basic answer. Tor needs much more money, both one-time and recurring, to continue its crucial work on censorship-resistant and private communication.

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