https://consensus-health.torproject.org/
Looks like the Tor consensus is broken at this moment. Unclear why. It'll take awhile for the network to fail. But if it stays broken it eventually will as the consensus becomes invalid.
Reminder: Tor is centralized. Knocking out a half dozen directory authorities is enough to shut it down.
@pete The Tor protocol can be decentralized by implementing it with JavaScript in the browser. node-Tor project on GitHub does that but the project is not getting attention.
I want to see this get built
http://www.peersm.com/Convergence-2020.pdf
@bryancyan That's incorrect. Tor requires a consensus over all Tor nodes. That consensus is what's centralized. There's no good way around it - arguably the very fact the consensus is centralized part of the argument as to why Tor is secure in the first place.
@pete Bitcoin’s consensus is not centralized.
@bryancyan Tor needs to come to consensus over bandwidth and other things that don't translate well into decentralized consensus schemes.
@bryancyan The reason why China manages to block Tor has nothing to do with the consensus mechanism. Any consensus mechanism can be blocked, by simply looking at what nodes are in the consensus and blocking them.
The actual problem for Tor re: blocking is china has basically moved to a whitelist model.
@bryancyan Tor has bridge nodes that specifically are _not_ part of the consensus. Those get blocked via what's essentially a white lost of allowed encrypted traffic.
@pete Tor bridges are not detectable hence block everything that’s not whitelisted, is what I think you are saying. That sounds infeasible for a free-flowing internet, but I guess the Chinese Communist Party does not care about that.
@bryancyan Exactly. I've actually seen that first hand myself when I visited China a few years back. Even a SSH tunnel could get detected and blocked if it started passing too much traffic.
@pete So just trust the Tor Project? They’re good people, they would never censor anything. But they can be blocked. That’s why Tor doesn’t work in China, where it is needed most. But everywhere is starting to look like China.