What is Zeronet?

Zeronet is a fairly new decentralized P2P dark web network. It works a bit like Bittorrent (but not really) and in stead of using an IP adres to visit a website, it makes use of a Bitcoin adres and private keys to identify a website.

What content is on Zeronet?

Recently i made an article about the difference between the dark and deep web with also some info on the different networks out there, like Tor, Freenet and I2p. This is where i first mentioned Zeronet itself, i also did not realize how many people are using Zeronet right now. To my surprise there were thousands of zeronet sites already!

From what i can tell, there are many blogs, chans and forums on multiple topics. And yes i also saw there were people sharing copyrighted materials like movies, tv shows and the like.

Very easy to get started

It will take you about 1 min to get started with Zeronet, the client with a normal webbrowser worked like a charm and i loved they layout. However when you want to use it in an anonymous way with Tor, there are a few more steps needed to make it work.

I will now show you a step-by-step guide to setup Zeronet with the Tor browser.

Step 1: Download the software

First things first, go to the official Zeronet website and download the needed software. Just a quick note, you will need winrar to extract the software.

Step 2: Extract the software

This software does not require an installation, so you should extract this package in your application folder. After extraction it’s ready to use.

Step 3: Locate zeronet executable

Open the extracted folder and look for the Zeronet executable file and launch it.

Step 4: Set connection to Tor only

When Zeronet is running (in your normal browser) look on the top right of the screen and click on “TOR: AVAILABLE” after that choose for “Enable Tor for every connection”. Now you can close this browser and fire up the Tor Browser.

Step 5: Start Tor Browser and change settings

When you have the Tor browser open, type “about:config” in the URL bar. You will now see the screen as in above picture. Click on Accept the risk!

Step 6: Change Tor Proxy Settings

For Zeronet to work you will need to change a setting that in previous Tor browser versions was located at the connections tab where you would put the adres 127.0.0.1 in the field “No proxy for”. In the newer versions this option has been removed. To get it working again you in the search bar “no_proxies_on”. This should only give you one result like you see in above picture. Double click the line and add in 127.0.0.1.

Step 7: Happy surfing

Now you just enter the adres http://127.0.0.1:43110/ in your Tor browser and you will be connected to Zeronet. From here you can just browse sites by clicking on ZeroSites. Have fun and remember, stay legal, stay safe!