[tor-dev] questions about parallel Tor circuits en masse & adoption drivers

[Simon]

Hello,

I'm interesting in discussing the development aspects of using Tor as
a massively distributed anonymous file server where blocks (e.g. 4KB)
of a particular file (e.g. even several GB in size) might be
redundantly distributed on very many hidden service nodes (e.g. a
unique 4KB block of a file redundantly duplicated on ~ x hidden nodes
from y million total hidden service nodes) and access to the file
would be high through-put because very many (e.g. cable bandwidth /
4KB, e.g. 50 Mbps is 6.25 MB/s or 1600 * 4KB blocks per second)
concurrent but high latency Tor circuits. Thus each Tor circuit would
still be the usual high latency, but very many Tor circuits in
parallel would deliver fantastic through-put. What if Tor could handle
several rolling window bundles of e.g. 1,600 parallel Tor circuits
which request one small block of info from 1,600 unique hidden service
nodes? Does Tor parallelized, high bandwidth file sharing already
exist? Does Tor already handle a massively parallelized number of Tor
circuits, on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of Tor
circuits? Is many concurrent Tor circuits desirable? Who is working on
it? Would using Tor as a massively distributed anonymous file server
dramatically increase the number of Tor nodes (due to file sharing
being more desirable than anonymity) and therefore make the entire Tor
system more resilient to attack due to high growth and orders of
magnitude more nodes? Is such an expansion -- on the back of a new
functional focal point; i.e. not anonymity -- politically desirable
for the Tor project?

Thanks,
Simon

Experienced network programming enthusiast from Vancouver, Canada