Cherry-picking Tor onion v3 and other overlay networks from Bitcoin

Would you like to help review some of the backport commits?

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Friends, am I missing something here? In the middle of 2025, zcash nodes still don’t support the Tor protocol?? This is unbelievable!

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i agree its something that shouldve been here already.
but we now have rust based version of Tor called Arti ready

and also Nym mixnet so

one of those should be integrated imo in ways to improve the privacy

i guess Zcashd deprecation is taking all the focus atm tho

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It’s actually quite cool that Zcash sponsored Tor’s to rust migration. I wasn’t aware of this. However, seeing that it happened back in 2021, it seems like something clearly went awry. Today, in 2025, the whole situation looks somewhat strange and rushed.

[forum. zcashcommunity. com/t/arti-a-pure-rust-tor-implementation-for-zcash-and-beyond/38776

Firstly, Tor is notoriously difficult to embed, but Arti solves this by being built as a set of Rust crates from the ground up.

What’s really puzzling is what’s so complicated that it’s justified waiting four years and still counting? Meanwhile, Arti is still not ready and not recommended for production use. Maybe they should rewrite it in Go and zcash users wait another five to ten years, then it’ll surely be a breeze to implement for Zcash .

Seriously though, I’ve never heard of anyone having issues with v3, whether it’s for cryptocurrencies or other services, and that it took a significant amount of time in any ecosystem.
It’s no surprise that Zcash isn’t used in practice as a private coin, despite trying to appear as one.

I’ve also heard about Nym. Everything sounds great on paper, but so far, it can’t be said that it’s “taken off” (with only 240 nodes today, and the project is five years old).
Moreover, in their VPN, there’s no option to pay with Zcash or swap it, even though they support over 1,000 different coins, including Monero (XMR) for sure, but not ZEC. (explorer. nym. spectredao. net/swap)

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Just re-read your post and thought you were trolling me with those Arti and Nym, and I didn’t catch the sarcasm and took it for real? :sweat_smile:

umm no.

i cant talk for other projects.
i dont know why the normal Tor couldnt be implemented and it would be great if it had been long time ago.

ok maybe Arti is not super ready for everything, its usable for some things. and Zashi wallet has integrated it to show ZEC price in privacy preserving way.

Nym might be kinda old project but it only launched to wide public last month for real. before it was in beta testing for long time. i do consider it in its early phase still from VPN world perspective.

about ZEC payment for Nym, its in plans when BTCpayserver Zcash plugin gets fixed up finally.

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Arti was completed just a few months ago. From:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti

Now that Arti has reached version 1.0.0, we believe it is suitable for
actual use to anonymise connections.

I’d love to see it integrated with Zebra and wallets. Yes it’s a huge shame that it hasn’t happened yet. But we simply hadn’t the time to work on it.

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Well, the final days for zcashd are steadily approaching. I thought I’d take a look at Zebra over the weekend, especially since it includes Tor, Nym, and blackjack with hookers.

Looking at zebra/zebra-network/Cargo.toml:
tor dependencies:
Wait until arti-client's dependency x25519-dalek v1.2.0 is updated to a higher version. (#5492)

Well, waited five years, now we’re waiting for something else… okay. Let’s see what stage this dependency is at.

It turns out it’s already resolved. We’re not waiting for anything anymore. Other circumstances arose a year ago, and that’s it.


github .com/ZcashFoundation/zebra/issues/8328#issuecomment-1969989648
Assignees: No one assigned

On the other hand: Why the heck bother with all these complications, this so-called “network security”? Investors don’t understand it anyway. And users… What users?

Give us a chance please. Investors are like users in this community, they’ve been de-prioritized so developers can finance their science experiments in peace. We need to get them back in here, it may take a little while but it’s doable.

I think investors, like users, very much care for all this; I certainly do. Stick around, we may need each others to make stuff like this happen!