As of recently, I've decided to put my efforts towards a safe, private, and censorship free Steem network. I built a service to help people obtain anonymous steem accounts, and also helped raise money for RiseUp which is an organisation dedicated to helping journalists and whistleblowers have secure communications.
Now, I present to you the first STEEM Tor RPC Node, and seed. It has all plugins enabled, and is equivalent to using STEEM.WS ran by the wonderful 
This means you can use it to seed your own STEEM node (port 2001) without leaving the TOR network, and can also use it for more anonymous STEEM services using tools such as Piston or SteemJS, and possibly cli_wallet too.
steemnodexfkk6vz.onion
Want to test it out without TOR? The RPC is available on port 80, which means you can use gateways such as onion.to
Example (with the CURL command line utility):
curl --data-binary '{"id":"1","method":"get_accounts","params":[["someguy123"]]}' https://steemnodexfkk6vz.onion.to/
Let's help to keep the STEEM network open and free to all. I'll be continuing on a few more anonymity/privacy projects to help keep STEEM open for everyone, rather than driven by a centralised platform.
Okay what does this mean for us non-techie people?
TOR is a privacy network which helps people communicate safely and privately, bypassing censorship. It's used by a wide range of people, including whistleblowers and journalists (such as Edward Snowden) to protect themselves from government censorship and attacks.
The TOR node will allow on STEEM:
- More services that may otherwise be censored, as their communications with STEEM are kept within TOR (a privacy network)
- People in oppressed countries will be able to connect to STEEM via TOR without problems.
- Some people may also use it for enhanced privacy
- It could also be used by STEEM witnesses to protect their location, however the latency may prevent that.