Obscuring P2P Nodes with Dandelion

ColinWright · 2025-12-08T16:27:29.000Z

Discussion: Obscuring P2P Nodes with Dandelion

Posted27 days agoActive21 days ago

ColinWright

67 points

4 comments

johndcook.comTech Discussionstory

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20/100

P2P NetworkingData_securityDandelion Protocol

Key topics

P2P Networking

Data_security

Dandelion Protocol

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108-120h

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01Story posted
Dec 8, 2025 at 11:27 AM EST
27 days ago
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02First comment
Dec 13, 2025 at 7:49 AM EST
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Dec 14, 2025 at 11:03 AM EST
21 days ago
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Discussion (4 comments)

Showing 7 comments

supermatt

23 days ago

1 reply

> A natural question is how this differs from something like Tor. In a nutshell, Tor offers identity protection before you enter a P2P network, and Dandelion offers identity protection inside the P2P network.

My understanding is that TOR also provides the latter - as that is specifically the purpose of the "onion" routing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

k__

22 days ago

Yeah.

I had the impression that onion services are exactly that: protection inside the P2P network.

basedrum

22 days ago

2 replies

The explanation for why Tor is different makes no sense. Instead of using a highly audited, 20 year proven, research backed protocol, let's invent something else? NIH syndrome

OutOfHere

22 days ago

Tor nodes are run by the NSA. Also, there is nothing prohibiting someone from using both Tor and Dandelion.

supermatt

22 days ago

I think it’s more that the author of the article doesn’t know what they are talking about. The paper itself makes no such comparison.

coppsilgold

22 days ago

As a user you should probably ignore Dandelion entirely (don't disable it if it's enabled by default) and use Tor anyway. Even if Dandelion works as advertised, you are still outing yourself as a user of Dandelion which is used for a single purpose: cryptocurrency. With Tor at least there is ambiguity about what activity is being performed.

Also either the author doesn't know anything about Tor or he phrased that sentence poorly.

dpc_01234

21 days ago

Dandelion is used to improve privacy of broadcasting (cryptocurrency transactions) and comparing it to Tor is silly.

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