1/ Personal story of how FOSS license and a helpful dev helped me run bitcoin full node despite blocking of torproject.org by government/ISP through DNS interference
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2/ 6 months ago I moved to Turkey and one of the first things I did was plug in my raspiblitz in my new home. I was pleased to see that it synced to current blockheight after restart without issues. All my channels were up and running, too. One of the benefits of running over Tor
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3/ So far so good.
Beginning of this year it was brought to my attention that Tor v2 addresses will be deprecated in mid 2021, so for my node to continue working, Tor needed to be updated.
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4/ This was when I noticed something was strange. Despite updating to the latest version of , Tor would remain on the old version. Soon I realized that update failed because access to torproject.org was blocked.
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#Tor network blocked in Turkey as government cracks down on #VPN use: technical report
turkeyblocks.org/2016/12/18/tor
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5/So I wrote this issue in the raspiblitz github. github.com/rootzoll/raspi
There were several suggestions on how to work around the censorship in my specific case, but most solutions wouldn't work for others in similar situation. That's when @nyxnor reached out to me, Bless you!
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6/ Running a node should be possible for everyone and it's especially important for people living in places with autocratic regimes that engage in censorship.
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7/ In a week or so, @nyxnor had forked the blitz project and added patches that would request the necessary packages over Tor instead of clearnet. Running blitz with his patch allowed me to update Tor despite censorship and have my node ready for v2 address deprecation.
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8/ But @nyxnor didn't stop there. Yes, I could update my node, but the censor could still see that I used Tor to do so. And there was a possibility that I could become a target for using it.
turkeyblocks.org/2016/12/18/tor
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9/ Everyone should be able to use the internet privately, but not all governments respect this human right. And those that don't respect it by disallowing privacy preserving tools are more likely to go after users who circumvent their censorship. @nyxnor saw this immediately and
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10/ continued to work on his fork of blitz for another month or so, modified it in a way that government or ISP could never see that Tor was even used. It would all look like regular internet traffic to them. Magic! 🤌
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11/ I am very grateful to @nyxnor for his help. He's a true Cypherpunk who writes code, but he could only help me because is a real open source project that can be forked, modified and redistributed.
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12/ imho, Bitcoin is built to resist tyranny and the reason why it is successful in this is because it is free and open to everyone. That's why I will always prefer bitcoin projects that are free open and source software over one's that aren't and I hope you'll do the same.
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13/13 If you want to learn more about the reasons why foss is important for Bitcoin, check out this article that I wrote some time ago
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My first Bitcoin article "Why Bitcoin can only be as Free Open Source Software" is published on the @fulmolightning Blog
blog.fulmo.org/why-bitcoin-ca
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