You could flip that argument too and say that the thousands of dollars one must pay to run an Oxen node is a threshold that intelligence agencies and governments can easily afford. While the idealists who just want to support the onion routing with bandwidth for a few bucks a month are shut out.

That's why tor is so massive, because anyone can support it. But that's also what makes tor vulnerable to sybil attacks. It's a catch 22.

Either way, my warnings bells go off when someone asks for thousands of dollars for crypto coins that have no real advantage like Monero.

Another question that comes up with Oxen is what happens if it's adopted. Because afaik each onion routing node is also calculating the blockchain. So the more transactions happen, the heavier these calculations get, right? So each onion routing node will require a lot of resources eventually, if this ever takes off.