Not connecting to Tor

Support
1

I installed bisq on Win10 64bit but everytime I start it, it fails to connect to Tor. Deleting outdated Tor files or using Bridges doesn’t help. I’m in Germany and I have a very common internet provider. I uninstalled and reinstalled but that didn’t help either.

2

Maybe you have a friewall or AV software creating problems? Does Torbrowser works?

3

It works now that I turned of Kasperski, Windows’ antivirus and firewall. Thanks!

4

So is this not risky turning off firewalls virus protection?

5

Using Windows itself when dealing with crypto is risky, I would say.
Antivirus software and firewalls, probably don’t do much on Windows anyway, but it is hard to tell.

2 Likes
6

Some AV behaves like malware. Better dont use Windows. Its a can or worms…

7

What would you recommend using?

8

I would recommend using a good Linux distro.
(I would also recommend using a separate machine for trading/cryptos/etc. With no userland etc. Today you find small 2nd hand machines, 16GB, for 150€).

1 Like
9

I’m having loads of TOR issues as well since I arrived in the Philippines.

Here’s what used to work for me:

Open Bisq, delete the outdated TOR files (should give you the option while trying to starting it up), shut it down. After that try one of the following:

  • Turn your internet router off and back on (fixes it most of the times)
  • If that didn’t work, get a VPN and try again. I’m using Protonvpn, some servers don’t work (IP probably got blacklisted from TOR) but I always managed to get rid off the TOR problem eventually after trying out different servers

I never had to restart my Laptop while doing this, and still got it working. However, reboot tut immer gut!

I’m using win10 64 bit version btw.

10

Bisq works with hidden services so the traffic never leaves the Tor network, this means that VPN never gets used, unless your connection to the Tor network in the first place is run over VPN.

This might be useful in case Tor is blocked in your country, but Tor bridges should work fine in these cases and they should be more hidden then VPNs.

1 Like
11

Yes using a VPN is a good way to get around Tor issues. I cannot connect since a few weeks as well with normal internet but with VPN all is fine. I assume my ISP either blocks Tor (prob not) or the my static IP was getting balcklisted for some unknown reason (prob. just a false positive from their ddos protection).