Rhombus as Tor Hidden Service

Tor hidden service conceals your IP address and thus your privacy

It also protects your machine from geolocation and its possible ugly consequences, and automatically sets you up for both incoming and outgoing connections, helping the Rhombus network. It is recommended to always run the Rhombus through Tor.

This guide is written purely for Linux (specificaly Ubuntu-based distributions).

If you don’t have a Rhombus wallet yet, download it (we highly recommend verifying wallet checksums before installing) and then install it.

At a command prompt just enter tor.

$ tor

If it is already running, you should get an error message that says something like “Is tor already running?” That’s good if you do.

If not, install Tor with these commands:

$ sudo apt-get install tor

$ sudo nano /etc/tor/torrc

We need to add our config to the Tor configuration file which will signal Tor to create a hidden service.

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/rhombus-service/
HiddenServicePort 51738 127.0.0.1:51738

Save the file with CTRL-X, type y to overwrite and confim by Enter – the text editor will exit.

$ sudo service tor restart

At a command prompt enter:

$ sudo cat /var/lib/tor/rhombus-service/hostname

It should return an .onion address, which we’ll refer to as [yourexternalip].onion

It is recommended to always run the Rhombus build releases through Tor.

In the .rhombus directory there will be a rhombus.conf file. The wallet can run without that but you can include a lot of startup and operating instructions with it.

$ nano ~/.rhombus/rhombus.conf

If nano returns the following error:

Error writing ~/.rhombus/rhombus.conf: No such file or directory

Then you’ll have the make the directory yourself (because the Rhombus wallet hasn’t ever ran on the system yet)!

$ mkdir ~/.rhombus
$ nano ~/.rhombus/rhombus.conf

Your rhombus.conf file will need to contain at least the following. Replace [yourexternalip].onion with the onion domain you got from step 3!

externalip=[yourexternalip].onion
onion=127.0.0.1:9050
addnode=7vusex6gv5eerqi2.onion
addnode=quf7tm4gk3xn3aee.onion
addnode=46fvsrrq75dx5vq4.onion
addnode=ciikdjtoop7l6p6h.onion
addnode=frlfghlielxq2ncy.onion
addnode=partusq5qad6jd2c.onion
addnode=x6fxdwpq2krxzmr3.onion
addnode=amu2ck7lyw26fiqs.onion
addnode=kfyopkn3shigcneh.onion
onlynet=tor
listen=1
bind=127.0.0.1:51738
maxconnections=30

Now you’re ready to go, start it up. You should start making connections. If you use the getpeerinfo command you’ll see the addresses of the peers and they should all be .onion addresses. Some of the peers will show your external IP .onion address and that’s normal, those are incoming connections.