[Bitcoin-development] Tor hidden service support

[Pieter Wuille]

Hello everyone,

a few days ago we merged Tor hidden service support in mainline. This means
that it's now possible to run a hidden service bitcoin node, and connect to
other bitcoin hidden services (via a Tor proxy) when running git HEAD. See
doc/Tor.txt for more information. This is expected to be included in the 0.7
release.

Additionally, such addresses are exchanged and relayed via the P2P network.
To do so, we reused the fd87:d87e:eb43::/48 IPv6 range. Each address in this
80-bit range is mapped to an onion address, and treated as belonging to a
separate network. This network range is the same as used by the OnionCat
application (though we do not use OnionCat in any way), and is part of the
RFC4193 Unique Local IPv6 range, which is normally not globally routable.

Other clients that wish to implement similar functionality, can use this
test case: 5wyqrzbvrdsumnok.onion == FD87:D87E:EB43:edb1:8e4:3588:e546:35ca.
The conversion is simply decoding the base32 onion address, and storing the
resulting 80 bits of data as low-order bits of an IPv6 address, prefixed by
fd87:d87e:eb43:. As this range is not routable, there should be no
compatibility problems: any unaware IPv6-capable code will immediately fail
when trying to connect.

-- 
Pieter

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