Guide

Coin over Tor

Coin already hides who paid whom and how much. Tor hides one more thing: where on the internet your payments come from.

What Tor adds

The blockchain never records IP addresses, and Dandelion++ makes it hard to tell which node a payment started from. Tor goes further: the nodes you talk to see a Tor address instead of your real one.

Before you start

Install Tor from the Tor Project. The Tor service listens on 127.0.0.1:9050. If you use the Tor Browser instead, it listens on 127.0.0.1:9150 while it's open.

Send your payments over Tor

Add this line to your node's coind.cfg and restart the node:

tx-proxy=tor,127.0.0.1:9050,10

Your node now sends the payments you make through Tor, to up to 10 Tor peers. If it can't reach any, it holds your payments rather than send them without Tor.

Reach a remote node over Tor

If your wallet uses a remote node, route that connection through Tor too. In the COIN Wallet, open Settings > Interface, turn on the Socks5 proxy and enter 127.0.0.1 and port 9050.

In the command-line wallet, add --proxy 127.0.0.1:9050 when you start it.

Advanced: let other nodes reach yours over Tor

Make your node an onion service, so Tor peers can connect to it. These steps use port 38883 as an example. Any free port works, as long as you use the same one everywhere.

1. Add an onion service to Tor's `torrc`

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/coin/
HiddenServicePort 38883 127.0.0.1:38883

2. Restart Tor and read your onion address

$ sudo cat /var/lib/tor/coin/hostname

3. Tell your node about it in `coind.cfg`

anonymous-inbound=YOUR_ADDRESS.onion:38883,127.0.0.1:38883,25

Replace YOUR_ADDRESS with the address from step 2. The last number limits incoming Tor connections.