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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

It is possible to run ipfs behind tor.

And I'd argue it is the right way to do so.

IPFS wont run via Tor, DHT is UDP based and Tor doesn't support UDP by design. Did my research last weekend, anybody more knowledgable, please correct me if I am wrong. Possibly it should run fine via I2P or Yggdrasil.

Googled ipfs and tor just to make sure it's not hard to find.

The first result was a guide on how to do it.

I'm not sure pointing to Google is "correcting him". But yeah, a good guide on how to use IPFS as an hidden service would be pretty useful.

(edit:typo)

did you also TEST it? last time i did this, it never really connected to the IPFS network. also it was marked as experimental

Yggdrasil is not really anonymous, though.

Doesn't that saturate Tor? Bittorrent via Tor was always highly discouraged to not overload the network with all the p2p traffic and IPFS is a very similar technique.

> Doesn't that saturate Tor? No, that's a stupid myth that needs to die. The tor network is nowhere near the advertised bandwidth capacity: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html

https://support.torproject.org/misc/misc-4/ links to TODO which says "We've been saying for years not to run Bittorrent over Tor, because the Tor network can't handle the load;" and links to a dead page "Why Tor is slow". I googled that and found https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Why_is_Tor_slow#Misuse_of_the_To... and https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/tor/slow/index... which sound like they were both sourced from that defunct page.

So, if you call it a stupid myth, please provide some credible proof. The Tor developers as well as the maintainers of two highly respected tools built upon Tor disagree with you.

> We've been saying for years not to run Bittorrent over Tor, because the Tor network can't handle the load;"

12 year old blog post. Both the tor network and internet as a whole are completely different.

> two highly respected tools built upon Tor disagree with you

Both of those pages have a citation that says "it is bad.... just cause it is okay!"

The credible evidence is in my original comment, that shows hundreds of gigabits being underutilized on the network.

how? i am behind NAT for example, i tried doing it. it did not work.

Is there a way for people who have just 20 mbit/s up/downstream and do not have an stable IP addres from home behind NAT?

I would run a server for long for seeding if it would be over TOR.

Running a hidden service on Tor should work without problems behind NAT

You mean, i can do a Hidden Service from behind NAT and connect that to IPFS via onion URL?

Let me see if i can figure this out :D

Dude come on, 20mb/s who will you serve with that, forget about it and move near a backbone.

That's the point of p2p with multiple seed though, every extra bps helps.

Well.. do you have Money for moving and paying subscription? :D

If he's got the rare file that you need, who cares if he's on 20mb/s or 2mb/s?

Pepperidge Farm remembers 300 baud.

If you have a way to run ipfs over tor, please share.

Any pointer on that?

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