[tor-talk] 2 hop mode for people that only want to use Tor for censorship circumvention to conserve bandwidth and decrease latency?

[Nathan Freitas]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016, at 04:34 PM, Ivan Markin wrote:
> Greg Norcie:
> > Even if we drastically increase the number of nodes in the network,
> > it's hard to imagine Tor (with 3 hops) will be able to have less
> > latency than a single hop VPN.
> 
> Of course VPNs will have lower latency than Tor anyways. The point is
> that there should be the moment when the lantency advance doesn't matter
> anymore (the difference is negligible). When this will happen there is
> no reason to use VPN for general user. We definetely can get there using
> faster crypto on faster crypto-accelerated/parallell hardware.

New users of Orfox (Tor Browser on Android) say that it feels faster
than the normal web. This is true, on mobile especially, because by
default, we block all javascript with no-script. This indeed makes the
loading of a web page faster, if you have a reasonably well performing
circuit.

In addition, many mobile apps use an asynchronous data fetch model, that
removes all connection between the user experience and the network stack
- Facebook, for instance, being one of these. If you enable the Orbot
routing feature in Facebook on Android, you hardly can feel any
difference, since the time it takes to sync new data into your timeline
is hidden from the user.

+n