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I upgraded to 0.21.0 a couple of days ago and noticed I'm no longer getting incoming connections while using Tor as a proxy. Was fine before the upgrade.

'getnetworkinfo' shows "reachable": true, "proxy": "127.0.0.1:9050" on ipv4, ipv6 and onion.

I've tried setting 'connect=myonionaddress' on my second node it's throwing the error "connect() to 127.0.0.1:9050 failed after select(): Connection refused (61)". Not sure if there's any configuration change that I need to do since the upgrade?

The debug.log file shows "Got service ID removedonionaddress, advertising service removedonionaddress.onion:8333"

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  • maybe you are using the auto binding on the onion address and your second node is trying to connect on the same onion address. This is only an idea. Jan 18, 2021 at 11:04

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I think everybody using Tor with the newest Core has the same problem, including myself. There’s a Good explanation here why this is happening:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/kzhhgk/bitcoin_core_0210_tor_v3/

My solution was to roll back (for now) to the previous version. It now works fine.

I still do not understand why this appears not to be backwards compatible with Tor v2. As the official bulletin release clearly states:

“This release adds support for Tor version 3 hidden services, and rumoring them over the network to other peers using BIP155. Version 2 hidden services are still fully supported by Bitcoin Core, but the Tor network will start deprecating them in the coming months. “

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    If you're using the automatic Tor hidden service functionality in Bitcoin Core (which you are, unless you've manually configured a hidden service), with 0.21, that will be a V3 hidden service. Older nodes cannot relay this address on the network, or connect to it, so until a significant portion of the network upgrades, there will be connectivity issues. This is an unfortunate chicken-and-egg problem. Jan 18, 2021 at 20:33
  • Thank you very much @PieterWuille for the clarification. I really need to get my head around it, because if true (I believe you btw), it splits the bitcoin network in two. It is quite ugly, from a Tor perspective, to remove backward compatibility, and imo this is going to have profound implications to the bitcoin core community dedicated in using only Tor (we are a big chuck of the network) Jan 18, 2021 at 21:38
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    It's unfortunate that TorV3 support landed in Bitcoin Core (and the Bitcoin network; it needed BIP155 first) so late. If it happened earlier, we'd have had time to first enable V3 support but not make it default yet. However, due to Tor's timeline of dropping V2 support we had no choice but making V3 default in 0.21. I suspect this is going to be a short temporary problem though as nodes upgrade. New nodes can still connect to old ones too, btw. Jan 18, 2021 at 21:50
  • Thanks for the feedback Pieter and Singh. I stuck with 0.21 but had to install the Tor daemon (was just using the Tor Browser before) to get it to connect to my 2nd node as I was getting the connection refused issue. Maybe I had setup something wrong in my conf...one other thing I've noticed is that my score is stuck at "4" on both nodes even though they've been up for more than 24 hours. Is this because I have no other incoming connections to my nodes at the moment?
    – neon_lurk
    Jan 20, 2021 at 2:52

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