Tor support
Feather works with Tor out of the box. You don’t have to manually install Tor to use it.
Feather releases are bundled with a Tor binary. If the presence of a local Tor daemon on the default port (9050) is not detected, Feather will place the bundled Tor binary in the config folder and run it on port 19450.
If you are unable to connect to the Tor network on your machine, you may configure Feather to use a different proxy (or no proxy at all).
Feather can be configured to handle traffic to nodes in three different ways:
- Never over Tor
- Switch to Tor after intial synchronization (default)
- Always over Tor
You have the option to select the desired mode when Feather is started for the first time before any network connections are made. You can also change the mode in the Settings → Network → Proxy tab.
By default, Feather routes all network traffic over Tor, except for wallet synchronization. Synchronization requires a lot of data transfer and is therefore very slow over Tor. A remote node does not learn much about your wallet during synchronization (for more information see Nodes). We believe this is a reasonable privacy / convenience trade-off.
On Tails, Whonix, or when Feather is started with torsocks
, all traffic is routed through Tor regardless of application configuration. Traffic to a local node is never routed over Tor.