Currently the performance of the Tor anonymity network is quite poor. This problem is frequently stated as a reason for people not using anonymizing proxies, so improving performance is a high priority of their developers. There are only about 1 000 Tor nodes and many are on slow Internet connections so in aggregate there is about 1 Gbit/s shared between 100 000 or so users. One way to improve the experience of Tor users is to increase the number of Tor nodes (especially high-bandwidth ones). Some means to achieve this goal are discussed in Challenges in Deploying Low-Latency Anonymity, but here I want to explore what will happen when Tor’s total bandwidth increases.

At Light Blue Touchpaper.

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