virtues of middlemen

[Jo]

On 30/12/2007, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> The Tor network so far is largely seen only as an anonymizing
> layer, to access the "real" Internet.
>
> However, it is fully capable of becoming a real Darknet,
> provided hidden services achieve a critical mass, and there
> will be a search engine indexing the lot, preferrably a
> distributed one.
>
> All of this, of course, assuming the network would scale
> to millions of nodes.

There were/are some sites which I think you could only see from Tor -
Secret Diary, forums, file sharing ... a quick scan of core.onion show
some more that may exist only inside the network.

Some recent discussions, though, seem to indicate that CPU is a large
bottleneck.  If the network will scale then will more nodes mean more
potential circuits, and will this reduce the CPU load on individual
hosts?  Or will it have some other effect?

Jo