How does a Tor Onion work?

Well Nostr is a public/private encryption keypair to prove who you are.  So is a Tor Onion.  The Onion address is the public key, and it works by exposing the public key to the network, so people can find you.  But the big negative of Onions is one has to keep the private key on the server itself.  This means if the location of the Onion is discovered, it’s game over.

But Nostr relays can be hosted with Tor Onions, which makes the network essentially impossible to stop.  Since the individual posters wouldn’t be bound to those physical locations, PLUS those locations aren’t easily known.  Also in Whonix, it would find a new Tor circuit for each Nostr relay.

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Why are Tor Onions so slow?

Normally Tor is 3 hops, but Onions take 6.  This is because you take 3 hops, and then you meet the “service” or other person who also took 3 hops at a “rendezvous point”.  This hides the location of both the server and the visitor.

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You ever wonder why Protonmail’s Tor Onion is so damn slow?

It’s because they use SSL encryption AND tor encryption.  You see all websites have httpS or SSL encryption.  But Tor has its own layers of encryption as well, these are peeled away “like the skin of an onion” on each hop.  But the Protonmail developers are negligent and don’t understand that the httpS encryption just slows down the encryption already provided by Tor, without adding anything of value.

Was this confusing?  You might like our animated video on “how Tor works” for beginners:
https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/how-tor-works/