[tor-relays] Exiting only port 8333

[grarpamp]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 4:20 PM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> +Roger, as I'm curious as to the rationale.

There was a pretty big thread debate a couple years back about
people only wanting to offer cleartext ports being seen as
(whether falsely or not) doing it purely so they can cheaply
steal content/tokens off the wire. I don't know if the current spec
has any commit relation to that.

> Yes, and allowing people to exit only Bitcoin traffic seems beneficial in
> other ways:  you're not likely to get abuse reports from just allowing port
> 8333, so the cost of being an exit for that is much lower. And it'd indeed
> take bandwidth pressure off other nodes.

Good point regarding lowering potential headache cost for those not
wanting that much of it. There's probably value in offering say all
ports but 80/443/25/torrent and whatever else is left out of 'reduced'.

>> The atlas graphs do show traffic for such nodes
>> providing essentially just 8333. They're usable manually,
>> just not automagically by the client I think. I forget
>> how their traffic is picked up.
>
> The globe page for my node shows "exit probability: 0" so I guess I'm indeed
> not being sent any.
>
>> There are 850+ nodes allowing 8333.
>> Have you considered running an onion:8333 seed node
>> to both serve btcnet and keep traffic off the exits?
>
> Yes but it doesn't get any traffic for reasons I haven't bothered to figure

Being an onion there'd be no tor mechanics preventing traffic.
It may just be the proportion of IP vs. onion nodes the btc client sees
is small so as not to make contact. You can 'setevents stream'
and see btc contacting onions. And can -onlynet, -connect, etc
the btc client to test.

> out yet. Anyway we can't run all of Bitcoin over Tor because it'd kill off
> our (admittedly quite weak) anti-sybil defences.

In that you presumably have to pay for commercial node farms
where tor nodes are free (and more bandwidth limited). On the other
hand, abundant crime money will probably be paying for those
farms anyway. So this could be mooot.

My motivation comment was if you were doing publishable
research or simply production for fun.