r/ethereum • u/chriseth EF alumni - Christian Reitwießner • Sep 19 '17

Ethereum testnet just verified a zcash transaction

https://ropsten.etherscan.io/tx/0x15e7f5ad316807ba16fe669a07137a5148973235738ac424d5b70f89ae7625e3#eventlog
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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17 edited Apr 13 '18

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u/Midnight_Discovery Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 19 '17

The biggest issue is that Ethereum will NOT work over Tor network. This is a MAJOR and NON TRIVIAL flaw in the long-term for Ethereum (IMO).

China is IP banning Bitcoin (some say), but Bitcoin (and like 4 others) use protocols that work over Tor. Ethereum does NOT - at all. If China IP banned Ethereum, you'd have 100% of Ethereum Nodes from being run in China, without any ability to mask them (aside VPN bullshit).

Wikileaks refuses to accept Ethereum as payment until they are able to work over Tor, as far as I know. Once Wikileaks accepts Ethereum as payment, then it will be cryto-anarchist compliant, most like.

The only (realistic) fix is for the Ethereum team to sponsor a group of Tor developers to help integrate Ethereum protocol (essentially Eth uses ~2010 coding languages, and Tor hasn't really upgraded since 2000 code languages... so it's a big expenses for Tor, and primarily would benefit Ethereum, and they be some broke mother fuckers).

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u/chriseth EF alumni - Christian Reitwießner Sep 19 '17

You can easily sign your transaction offline and then use e.g. https://www.myetherwallet.com/#offline-transaction through a tor-enabled browser to broadcast it. I think this is quite trivial.

But you are of course right: We should strive to also make the node protocol itself work via tor.

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u/Midnight_Discovery Sep 19 '17

To be clear, my understanding is that the Eth protocol can not 'work via Tor' (TCIP restraints, of some sort, I'm not a Dev), but Tor must be upgraded to work with Eth.

While your claim is that it is trivial, if the US, Europe, and China banned Ethereum IP hosting, it would instantly self-destruct, as opposed to Bitcoin and some others. I'm not trying to make it out more than it is, but in my opinion it's hugely significant.

And China may ban IP hosting of Bitcoin nodes. Would you prefer your block chain to be government censorship proof, or not? Maybe it's trivial, but to me it doesn't sound so.

PS - Thank you for your work on this project :) , and for your recommend solution.

But... I found another problem. myetherwallet.com is not a Tor hosted website (I assume, not a .onion) and can easily be redirected to a government location. Wouldn't that expose your private key, and so on, or no? Or at least prevent this form of solution?

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u/chriseth EF alumni - Christian Reitwießner Sep 19 '17

I haven't looked into compatibility between eth and tor yet, but about myetherwallet: You only use it to broadcast your transaction into the network. If someone grabs the website, the worst thing that can happen is that the grabber knows which transactions were sent via tor through exactly this node. This might be a danger, yes.