Re: Call for more Bitmessage Onion Peers

On Fri, 5 Jan 2024 18:44:34 +0100
Stefan Claas <[email protected]> wrote:

> Anonymous wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 9 Jun 2023 20:44:32 -0500
> > Bitmessage <[email protected]> wrote:
> >   
> > > The Bitmessage anonymous network would benefit from more hidden
> > > onion peers that accept incoming onion connections.  
> > 
> > <snip>
> > 
> > (+1) one new hidden onion peer established today
> > 
> > (++) will add more peers after testing  
> 
> Would you please be so kind and post the .onion addresses,
> so that we can add a trusted peer in the BM client config.
> 
> Regards
> Stefan

The original top post of this thread says this:

> If you do establish a onion Bitmessage peer please eventually
> announce it here on Usenet, but DO NOT announce which hidden onion
> address is yours. That would link it to your Usenet traffic, which
> you don't want. Just a friendly blurb like, 'now running a Bitmessage
> onion service' is enough notice. Perhaps do a one-time nymshift for
> the announcement as well just for privacy sake.

So evidently posting the onion address may lessen privacy.

Your Bitmessage client will eventually get all available hidden peer
addresses from the network. These can be found in the knownnodes.dat
file in the PyBitmessage configuration folder.

If you want to use trustedpeer setting you should run your own hidden
peer on a server that you control. Then you can set your local client
to use your own trustedpeer.

When running a remote trusted peer it is advisable to not create any
chan or address keys on that trusted peer. This will ensure that no
messages containing a potentially exploitative payload can be decrypted
on that peer. For maximum security your trusted peer should only relay
encrypted objects and do nothing else.

Bitmessage run this way in daemon mode uses very little memory and CPU.
If you have a server or VPS you should have plenty of power to run a
hidden relay peer.

The more hidden peers that users add to the network the more secure
and anonymous the network grows. More importantly it grows more
resistant to censorship.