Bitcoin node stopped finding peers via Tor
Question
I've been running a Bitcoin full node on an Ubuntu server for years. Bitcoind connects via Tor to hide my Bitcoin usage from my ISP. In mid-December, I suddenly stopped getting peers, and I stopped downloading new blocks.
This is how my bitcoin.conf used to look like:
proxy=127.0.0.1:9050
listen=1
bind=127.0.0.1
As soon as I commented out the above lines, I found peers again and new blocks were successfully downloaded (but I'm no longer behind Tor).
Tor seems to be running fine on my server. I can still connect to a hidden service set up on the same machine, and the output of curl --socks5 localhost:9050 --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 -s https://check.torproject.org/ | cat | grep -m 1 Congratulations | xargs is 'Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor.'
I would like to resume using my node behind Tor. Any help is appreciated.
btw: I'm using Bitcoin Core 0.21.1.
Answer 1
Your configuration is likely the issue. Remove bind=127.0.0.1 from your config. It's making the node only advertise and listen on localhost, not over Tor. Also, ensure onlynet=onion is not set. Use just proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 and listen=1. Restart bitcoind. It should find onion peers again.