My 'Zcash on Tor' project status update

Community Grants
1

I was the recipient of a 2017 Q4 Zcash Foundation project grant for my ‘Zcash on Tor’ project.

See: Zcash addnode Tor hidden service .onion

After disbursement, unfortunately the dollar market value of my grant dropped in real terms from around $500 per ZEC to below $50 per ZEC. Due to difficult ongoing personal circumstances it simply became impossible to continue with the original proposal.

However, I notified members of the Zcash Foundation that I would continue to run project servers at a reduced throughput and I have continued to operate between 6 to 10 updated zcashd on Tor v2 servers to-date.

Notice, however: on October 15th, 2021 … The Tor Project Inc., …

“We will release new Tor client stable versions for all supported series that will disable v2.”

See: Onion Service version 2 deprecation timeline | The Tor Project

…

Whilst my ‘Zcash on Tor’ project would endeavour to (continue to) run new v3 .onion zcashd servers … “helping to strengthen the network and contributing to a social good” … and to better fulfil my original project proposal to the community … it is not going to be possible for myself to consider doing this without more substantial funding moving forward.

I’ve become increasingly disenfranchised and I feel somewhat out-of-pocket.

…

I’m of course delighted to see " Arti: A pure-Rust Tor Implementation for Zcash and beyond get funded to the tune of $670K …

It would perhaps be great to see the long-term supporters of these essential privacy technologies get better support!?

…

‘BitcoinFX’ / xyZcash - See: [ANN] Bitcoin (BTC) on Tor addnodes Project.

Cheers!

Onwards.

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This is unfortunate. Perhaps if you had brought this up sooner (no posts in 3years?) ZF or ZOMG could have helped out.

You still have the option of applying for a new grant: https://grants.zfnd.org

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Indeed. Yes this should of been brought up sooner.

I will register and apply for a new grant in time whilst I start to migrate services.

zancas has been kind enough to update me via PM as to the current ‘work-in-progress’ status with ZIP155 Backport of BIP155 (enabling Torv3 .onion services with Zcash).

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We have more current status available on github, for interested parties.

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