Request to Deprecate DarkScience IRC Network as transport

[dijit]

👋 Hi JoinMarket Team!

First off, I want to thank you for choosing our network as part of your infrastructure. It’s been great to play a role in supporting your efforts to build a privacy-preserving system like JoinMarket. Privacy and freedom of choice are values we’ve long upheld on our network, and it’s been rewarding to see your project grow over the years.

That said, we’ve recently revisited the resources and priorities of our network. As you’ve likely noticed, the stability of the network (as it relates to Tor) has begun to suffer quite badly; this is because JoinMarket now represents a significant portion of our connections — over 90% in some cases. While we’re glad to have been able to support you, this level of usage has started to strain our ability to provide stable and equitable access for the rest of our user base too.

After careful discussion, we’ve decided that it’s time to transition away from providing unrestricted access to our infrastructure for JoinMarket. This decision wasn’t made lightly, and it’s definitely not a reflection on your team or your project — it’s simply a matter of balancing our resources to better serve the broader community.
We’d like to make any transition as smooth as possible for you. To that end, we’re happy to discuss a timeline and work with you on any technical adjustments needed to shift your operations to another network, or even provide advice in hosting your own network. Please let us know how we can best assist you during this process.

We’ve been honoured to support JoinMarket’s mission and we all at DarkScience wish you continued success in your work. If there’s any further feedback you’d like to provide or ways we can improve this process, don’t hesitate to reach out.

TL;DR: We would greatly appreciate efforts to change the IRC network in your default config defined here: joinmarket-clientserver//src/jmclient/configure.py

Best regards,

@dijit
On behalf of the DarkScience Operations Team

[PulpCattel]

Thank you for letting us know and for all the years of service, I'm sorry for any problems we may have caused you.

@kristapsk @AdamISZ

Our latest release (0.9.11) uses DarkScience as its "main" message channel, the other two IRCs are either off by default or not working IIRC, and our directories are still somewhat unreliable.

[AdamISZ]

Indeed. It seems the root problem is finding a way for Tor to be more reliable for the usage pattern of Joinmarket (maybe?), considering that we made the effort to create an alternative to IRC that should have avoided this 2 years ago, but connections never ended up working reliably. Maybe someone can figure out how to fix that.

But as for the taking up of darkscience resources, I echo @PulpCattel 's response. Thanks.
I don't currently have a suggestion for alternatives.

[AdamISZ]

I will mention one minor thing though: I've just been testing https://github.com/citadel-tech/coinswap/ (still in a very early stage) and they are using a dns server accessible via an onion. I'm not sure if it'd make a difference (obviously they don't have users yet!), but perhaps a dns server would work better for our directory nodes? Just a thought.

[kristapsk]

the other two IRCs are either off by default or not working IIRC

Hackint is also enabled by default in current master, but not in latest release.