Hi, I have a bitcoin knots running on Oracle VM, I want to make sure my ISP doesn’t know that I run a bitcoin node, this is very important for my safety and security as it’s extremely prohibited to use bitcoin where I live, they can easily throw me in jail if the government somehow was informed.
I synced the node while my IP was exposed but now after sync I really want to run in as privately as possible, I use TOR but it’s so slow and I never find peers. I was thinking maybe VPN is an option?
If I can’t do it privately unfortunately I can’t do it at all as it’s too risky. I’d really appreciate your help.
In your situation I really would not recommend moving away from Tor-only peers. When you say that it never finds peers, do you mean literally never any peers and the blockchain gets out of sync, or just that it takes a very long time to bootstrap when first starting? Could you share the specific config tweaks you made in Knots?
If you do try a VPN on the Windows machine, then I would configure Knots to not accept incoming connections, and make sure you have NAT for the network config (not bridged adapter) in VirtualBox (which means you will only be able to connect to your server from the Windows host machine, or via Tor browser). A better VPN setup (though more technically challenging to set up) is to configure the VPN on your router or on a dedicated bridge adapter, which the Windows computer connects to for internet. This would reduce the chances for accidental leaked traffic over your residential IP.