Proposal 160: Authorities vote for bandwidth offsets in consensus

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 12:46:50PM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> Oh!  Here's one more we may want to think about:
> 
> Right now, clients don't believe any bandwidth value over a certain
> amount, so that routers can't say "I have a 1 Terabyte capacity!" and
> get all the traffic.  But if bandwidths are measured by the
> authorities, it could become safe to believe big bandwidths.  Thus,
> the consensus should indicate whether its bandwidth values are to be
> clipped or not.

I think we should just declare that they're never to be clipped. Why
leave it to old clients to decide what's safe for them, and splinter
the anonymity sets? In fact, proposal 141 already says this:

  Authorities will cap the bandwidth number at some arbitrary value,
  currently 10MB/sec.  If a router claims a larger bandwidth an
  authority's vote will still only show Bandwidth=10240.
  [...]
  Clients should believe the bandwidth as presented in the consensus,
  not capping it again.

--Roger