Parallax v2.1.0 is out. The last release ended with a promise: that soon you'd be able to run a node without telling anyone where you are. This is that release.
The last thing your node gives away
Parallax asks almost nothing of you. No account, no sign-up, no permission. You install the software, it checks every block for itself, and nobody gets a vote on whether you're allowed to participate.
But until now it did take one thing, because every peer-to-peer network takes it: your address. To connect to other computers you have to tell them where you are, and on the internet, where you are is very nearly who you are. An IP address maps to a country, a city, an internet provider, and — one records request later — a person. Every peer your node talks to learns it. Anyone who runs a few nodes and listens can, over time, assemble a fairly good map of who runs the network and from where.
For most people, most of the time, that's a tolerable trade. But a network meant to carry money should not have "a map of everyone who holds it" as a structural property. Some of the people who most need money that no one can freeze or forbid are exactly the people for whom that map is dangerous.
An address that isn't a place
Tor's onion services turn the assumption around. An onion address is not a location — it's a cryptographic key. When two computers connect through one, they meet in the middle, each arriving through its own encrypted tunnel, and neither ever learns where the other actually is. The address proves you've reached the right party, mathematically, without ever saying where that party lives.
Bitcoin nodes have been running this way for over a decade, and Bitcoin Core's Tor integration has been refined the whole time under real adversarial pressure. As with the peer-management rebuild in v2.0.0, Parallax ports that design rather than inventing a new one. The same flags, the same defaults, the same carefully chosen behaviors — because in privacy code, novelty is a cost, not a feature.
It works without being asked
If a Tor daemon is running on your machine with its control port enabled,
the node does everything itself. Enable the control port in /etc/tor/torrc:
ControlPort 9051
CookieAuthentication 1
CookieAuthFileGroupReadable 1restart Tor, and start the node as usual. No new flags. On startup it finds the Tor daemon, creates a v3 onion service pointing at its own listener, asks Tor where its proxy lives, and starts dialing onion peers through it. Your node is now reachable from inside Tor — with no port forwarding, no firewall configuration, nothing — and it announces its onion address to the network the same way it would announce an IP.
The onion identity is a small key file in your data directory, so your node keeps the same onion address across restarts. Other operators can add it to their peer lists like any other address.
Fully dark
The default setup is dual-stack: your node is reachable both at its IP and at its onion address. That's good for the network — it bridges both worlds — but it publicly links the two, so it adds reachability, not anonymity. For anonymity there's one more step:
parallaxd --onlynet=onionThis runs the node entirely inside Tor. It never opens the UDP discovery socket, never touches DNS, never asks your router to open a port. It finds its first peers from onion addresses shipped with the client, then learns more from gossip, all of it through Tor. And it will not advertise an IP address over a Tor circuit even when it knows one — the code refuses, unconditionally, because an anonymity system with a "just this once" exception is not an anonymity system.
A node run this way finds peers, accepts incoming connections, and publishes its own address without its IP ever appearing anywhere on the network. Not obscured. Never revealed.
The small rules, again
The v2.0.0 post made the case that security lives in unglamorous details. Privacy does too, so v2.1.0 is full of small rules:
Every peer gets its own Tor circuit, so no single relay sees enough of your connections to correlate them. Onion services always advertise the network's standard port, whatever port you actually listen on, so an unusual port choice can't fingerprint you. If you route clearnet traffic through a proxy, the node silently switches off every side channel that would betray your address anyway — the discovery socket, system DNS, the router protocols that announce your presence. Peers that reach you through Tor are anonymous to you too: your node sees that someone connected, and by design nothing more.
None of these would be worth a headline. Together they're the difference between a node that's hidden and a node that merely feels hidden.
What this doesn't do
Being straight about limits is a habit worth keeping.
Tor hides your node, not your transactions. The chain is public; every payment on it is as visible as it ever was. What v2.1.0 conceals is your participation — the fact that this machine, at this address, is running a node — not what any address on the chain is doing.
Your internet provider can still see that you use Tor, even though it can no longer see what for. In most places that's unremarkable. Where it isn't, Tor bridges exist, and they work for Parallax the same as for anything else.
And routing ordinary clearnet connections through Tor's exit relays works, but only about one circuit in six reaches a Parallax port — most exits don't carry non-standard ports; Bitcoin has the same property. Onion-to-onion connections don't use exits at all and connect reliably in seconds. Inside Tor, the network is first-class; through Tor's edge, it's a fallback.
Nothing to coordinate
No fork, no flag day, no vote. The wire format already carried onion addresses the way Bitcoin's does; nodes that can't dial them pass them along anyway, so onion addresses spread through the whole network even where most nodes never use them. Tor connectivity simply grows as individual operators switch it on — each one making the map of the network a little less complete.
If you run a node
Upgrade normally; nothing changes unless you opt in. If Tor happens to be
running with its control port open, your node will quietly become reachable
as an onion service — that's the intended default, and the startup log will
say so. If you build software against Parallax as a library, the Go module
path moved to /v2, as Go requires for a v2 release.
Downloads, checksums, and the complete technical notes are on the v2.1.0 release page. The operator guide — including the fully-dark setup and troubleshooting — is "Running over Tor" at docs.parallaxprotocol.org.
Where you are is your business
There are twenty-one million LAX, a block roughly every ten minutes, and no one who can change either. v2.0.0 made it expensive to lie to a node about what the network believes. v2.1.0 makes it expensive to find the node at all.
A network nobody can map is harder to pressure, harder to intimidate, and harder to quietly switch off — not because its operators have something to hide, but because a system built to need no permission shouldn't leak a list of people to ask. You can run a Parallax node today, and where you run it is nobody's business but yours.