[messaging] Are vanity onion domains a good idea?

[micah]

Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> writes:

> Two simple fixes for the case of non-anonymous services:
>
> 1) Don't use onion addresses. For non-anonymous services it's just being
> used as a hack around the difficulty of reliably identifying Tor
> connections. Otherwise you could just tell users to browse to
> tor.facebook.com and then the server would give an error page if you
> weren't coming from an exit. It'd be faster too.

Tor onion services (formerly known as 'hidden services') give you more
than what you get from just traversing the tor network the traditional
way. When you access an onion service, you 'exit' from the service
itself, rather than from an arbitrary exit node (and then traverse from
that exit node over the internet to the actual service).