[tor-talk] Full integration with bitcoin (suggestion / feature request)

[Akater]

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Check out OpenLibernet (http://openlibernet.org) They suggest a design
for a fee-based mesh network. It's worth some studying, just to grasp
the complexity of the problem.

Also, you will probably find little enthusiasm from Tor community
for this.

What actual problem does the fee-based network solve? Free market is
the best mechanism* to allocate scarce resources. Bandwidth is not
that scarce, while private and pseudonymous or anonymous Internet
access is not that desired (which is demonstrated clearly by how
almost anyone who knows about benefits of Tor, GNU or PGP doesn't even
bother trying). The lack of demand leads to the fact that Tor works
fine even without being terribly efficient. Nobody cares about
effective free market solution, and it may be that nobody will until
it's too late.

Thus, with a fee-based network, you target a rather narrow initial
audience---which is not bad at all in itself, but, it hence requires a
design far elaborate than something that can fit into a short
plain-text email message. And a *very* clear understanding why** you'd
want something better than Tor in its present state---not just
"because free market makes things better". Sure it does but 1) lots of
engineers currently in the distributed networking will disagree; 2) a
better thing will not necessarily survive unless it's so much better
that even a blind (which in our case would be a casual user)
will see it.

- ----

* A thermodynamic term would fit better but I'm close to being
ignorant in thermodynamics.

** Some examples: a) Tor is less secure than it could be because it is
not attractive enough for users to run its exit nodes; b) it is at
mild risk of extinction, for the same reason; c) running a BitTorrent
client via Tor is still regarded a bad idea; d) setting up an onion
server and advertising it is more difficult than it should be.


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