Update Friday, 27 Sept 2018
Decent couple of weeks of fun and progress
First off, all of the issues for the 2.1.0 release on the wallet have been closed off. I’ve done a first pass at a beta 1, but several issues have come up between the node and the wallet, so will likely be a couple of days before we urge everyone to start trying it out.
Secondly, the subject of transaction exchange has been at the forefront in recent discussions, and if you’re at all interested you can see the entire colourful history in the keybase tx_exchange channel. To summarize my current position on this (which I think is basically the majority consensus most participants in the channel reached independently:)
- Mixnets look great on paper, but most of them are purely academic, untested, and don’t actually exist
- i2p looks good in theory as well, however:
- it uses a lot of outdated cryptography
- The project doesn’t appear to be particularly well maintained or have a lot of direction
- Stopping and starting i2p nodes in the way a wallet needs adds to instability in the network
- Tor isn’t perfect either, but as outlined in @david’s RFC, onion services give us a logical manner of creating verifiable addresses unlinked to IP addresses or other identifying information, alleviates firewall issues and gives us much better privacy then we have now (pretty much none over http).
There are still a lot of potential issues with Tor as the only method of transaction just yet, namely the fact it could be very difficult to get it working on mobile (iOS in particular,) and it’s not a great choice for node p2p communication. There are also installation and bundling issues, which could be annoying to maintain but not insurmountable from a technical perspective. However, of all of the ideas presented this one give some very tangible benefits, and has the big advantage that the Tor network exists and is usable today. So I think it’s therefore very much worth exploring to the fullest to see where we can get with it. I absolutely cannot promise right now this will become the only method of exchange, but it’s definitely a promising approach.
So that’s brings us to the Experimental TOR PR
I’ve been working on over the past few days. It’s at the point where it works with a lot of manual setup, but it looks promising, and I look forward to seeing how we can deal with the outstanding issues over the next couple of weeks. If you’re at all interested in this method of exchange, we’d very much appreciate if you could give it a try. I’d hope to merge the work there into master once 2.1.0 is out (as it still remains very much optional,) but for now, the instructions are all in the PR
Will have more to say on the particulars of the Tor integration over the next few weeks. Time for weekend, I think.