Great, I've been looking forward to working on the Linux build. If you connect to Freenode's hidden service, then they tell you they've also banned TOR from that due to abuse and it kicks you off. There's a several step procedure you can do to run a password utility on unix and e-mail request an account that you could login with, but that's getting pretty complicated. I wonder if we could get away with applying for one account and then everyone use the same account? I suppose the IRC server probably limits accounts to one login, or some admin might not like to see a dozen logins on the same account. Besides the IRC part, how did your test of proxy go? Since you've been connected before, your addr.dat contains known node addresses, but without IRC to know which ones are online, it takes a long time to find them. There are normally 1 to 3 other nodes besides you that can accept incoming connections, and existing nodes that already know you would eventually connect to you. How many connections did you get, and how long did it take? I guess to know whether it successfully connected outbound through TOR you'd need to search debug.log for "connected". To originally connect with TOR without connecting normally once to get seeded, you'd have to know the address of an existing node that can accept incoming connections and seed it like this: bitcoin -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 -addnode=<ip of a node> If some nodes that accept incoming connects were willing to have their IP coded into the program, it could seed automatically. Or some IP seed addresses posted on a Wiki page with the instructions. Another option is to search the world again for an IRC server that doesn't ban TOR nodes. Or if we could get someone to set one up. IRC servers ban TOR because they have actual text chat on them... if there was one with just bots and junk then it wouldn't care. Probably should post a question on the forum or the mailing list and see if anyone knows one. Another problem is that TOR users can't accept incoming connections, and we have so few that can. If everyone goes to TOR, there won't be any nodes to connect to. We have a shortage of nodes that can accept incoming connections. It generally ranges from 2 to 4 lately. We need to emphasize the importance to people of setting up port forwarding on their router. Every P2P file sharing program has instructions how to do it. We should have a paragraph on the bitcoin.sourceforge.net homepage urging people to set up port forwarding to accept incoming connections, and a link to a site that describes how to do it for each router. mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote: