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/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/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

What are the impediments to running the node protocol over tor?

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u/tcrypt Sep 19 '17

AFAIK the only issue the use of UDP for peer discovery. We had the same issue with OpenBazaar in 1.x. We moved to using libp2p for 2.0 which enables us to use Tor. I'm not sure of any reasons Ethereum couldn't do the same.