Just set up a 5TB external HDD, moved my blockchain and torrents. Super handy but I have a situation. Can't forward port 8333 on my router since I'm using a VPN, so I decided to use a Tor hidden service for incoming connections to my node. Followed a guide on setting it up on Linux, and got it working. Got my bitcoin.conf optimized by AI, but...
Hey, I'm not on Linux now, but my bitcoin.conf is already set for Tor. Honestly, it should be good as is. Incoming connections can take time, so chill. You can check this guide for a deeper dive: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tor.md
Update: waited a bit longer and now I have 3 onion connections! That's cool. I'm happy with my setup, using a Cold Card wallet with Bitcoin Core's PSBT, fully air-gapped and running my own node through Tor. Helping the network 24/7.
Your config looks fine, but just a heads up...
1. maxconnections=125 and others are default values. Adding them doesn’t really change anything.
2. maxconnections only limits total connections, Bitcoin Core already does 10 outbound by default.
3. txindex=1 doesn’t really contribute to the network.
Tor and Bitcoin Core have solid defaults.
When my node is slow with incoming connections, I manually add onion nodes using bitnodes. After a bit, those.onion addresses pop up in my connections. Give it a shot!
I want my node to talk only via Tor, so I have a few tweaks in my bitcoin.conf. Bigger mempool, saves state before shutdown, full RBF activated, and I keep my debug.log history.
A bit late, but if you wanna level up your contribution, add peerblockfilters=1 and blockfilterindex=1 to your config. This helps serve light clients with BIP157/BIP158. Just a heads-up, enabling this will create a separate index, but you'll get more light-client peers.
New onion addresses take time to spread. That’s why the incoming connections are low. The longer your node runs, the more other nodes will grab your onion address and connect. In a few months, you should see way more incoming connections.