OnionTip – Donate to volunteers who are running Tor relays | Hacker News Reader

OnionTip – Donate to volunteers who are running Tor relays

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149 pointshuitseeker29 comments

There's a discussion about whether volunteers running Tor relays should be motivated by cash reward. During the June 5th ResetTheNet campaign the EFF put up a landing page for beginners to set up nodes and rewarded people with merchandise etc. if they lasted a certain amount of time. But it's possible that many of the nodes that were set up because of this were not long-lasting.

Motivating people with short-term reward does not produce long-lasting relays.

EDIT: It seems like they are, but I wouldn't mind an update on this. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/tor-challenge-inspires...

From my understanding the rewards aren't that big, even with large tips like the 10 BTC one. It's probably more of an acknowledgement thing.

The EFF's Tor Challenge reward was really nominal - they offered "a limited-edition sticker if your Tor relay is still running 12 months" later. It was really more symbolic than anything else.

For a high-bandwidth relay (>1MBps) you also get a t-shirt!

Personally, the rewards were secondary: the drive mainly just reminded me to set up permanent relays, so I did. :-)

This might be the only way the NSA is going to get paid for what they do directly by the users of Tor.

(To avoid looking suspicious the NSA will probably have to list some of their Tor nodes here)

They don't need money; they already get millions (maybe billions?) from American taxes.

The point the GP making is that the create the air of legitimacy they will list here.

I think the filtering stuff should be hidden by default, it looks like you have to pick a country plus I don't know what an exit vs guard is.

Also bitcoins only is really exclusionary.

Bitcoin is perfect for this. Each relay can publish a Bitcoin address, and the subsequent distribution by OnionTip can be confirmed by looking at the blockchain to see who they split the donations between. TOR enthusiasts and Bitcoin holders probably overlap an awful lot.

You could do this without a middleman, though. Can't you set up bitcoin transactions with multiple outputs?

Bitcoin is perfect if the goal is that 99% of the world can't donate.

It's pretty simple to get bitcoin today. Especially now Circle has launched.

Circle only works for ~4.5% of the world population.

Is there a method of making donations to anonymous benefactors that more than 10% of the world population can contribute to, that doesn't require having local collection-points in each contributing area?

Now that I think of it, that'd kind of be a neat nonprofit startup: do what the Salvation Army does, putting lots of collectors on lots of corners--but instead of the collection being associated with a specific charity, people would be given a little envelope to put their money in and write what charity it's intended for (with some pre-printed envelopes handy for major ones, likely.) The company would centrally collate donations, and send cheques each month to the recipient charities. A recipient charity wouldn't even have to sign up for this; they'd just start receiving money (sort of like what happens with royalties when people listen to a song on Spotify.)

I took you up on that, took about 15 minutes for circle to tell me they're USA-only.

You're certainly right in the case of the general population. That being said, amongst those who know about Tor and actively use/support Tor, I'd imagine the amount of bitcoin fluent people is significantly higher.

Most of the world (with some countries excepted) can donate they just have to do an extra step of acquiring Bitcoins.

It this worth it to maintain anonymity? Convenience over security isn't really in the spirit of tor..

I imagine that more than 1% of people who are aware of Tor have bitcoins or can easily obtain them.

I'm only replying to you but your sentiment has been expressed by others replying to me.

I think we can divide people into three groups:

1) uses Tor + Bitcoin

2) is aware of Tor and may support their goals, in exactly the same way a person without cancer may support an organization seeking to cure cancer

3) don't know/care

You guys are very quick to dismiss that middle group which includes the audiences of the biggest mainstream news and tech news sites:

IB Times, Gizmodo, NPR, Vice, ABC News, BoingBoing, ThinkProgress, Washington Post, Ars Technica, Telegraph.co.uk, PCWorld, USA Today, Computerworld, Lifehacker, Popular Mechanics, BusinessWeek, Wired, ZDNet, The Register, EFF, PBS, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, Venture Beat, The Next Web, eWeek, TIME, BBC, NBC, RT, Fast Company, The Verge and The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.torproject.org/press/press.html.en

In addition, this was built at the Dublin Bitcoin Hackathon, so I assume the authors are explicitly interested in promoting bitcoin use a bit more as well.

> Also bitcoins only is really exclusionary.

It's also the only way to run something like this for many privacy advocates.

Perhaps they should allow users to (optionally) donate via PayPal then pay offer BTC-only payouts to node operators.

I just setup a relay, and was reading up on what to expect. Apparently it won't start consuming any reasonable amount of resources for several months.

That seems extremely inefficient and quite bizarre. I understand that each node reports their available bandwidth, and also reports how much bandwidth was actually used the previous 24 hours.

There was a vulnerability where new nodes were misreporting their bandwidth, and taking more than their fair share of traffic and I guess doing nefarious things with it.

So they added a bit of a trust anchor by publishing an additional bandwidth metric as reported by a trusted pool of 'auditors'. But this takes some time to populate.

Even then, there are various mechanisms which will keep utilization quite low for a long time after you publish a new relay.

...so not as much fun booting up a relay without being able to watch the bits start flying by...

A couple of days ago a colleague received $4 AUD tip share due to a large tip which he thought might've been the 10 BTC tip: https://twitter.com/BitcoinNews3/status/516097500755668992

Honest question, what makes setting up a Tor Delay so prohibitive? What would be the possibility of say buying a few rasberry pi's and then placing them in discreet locations where wi-fi is free and piggy backing on their network? e.g. Every McDonald's restaurant

It's not hard to set up a Tor relay. However, to run a good relay, you need a stable internet connection with at least 20KByte/s of symmetric bandwidth. I think that you also need ports to be forwarded (manually, or with uPnP/PMP) in order to run a relay. It's not likely that you'll get stability or port forwarding by piggy-backing on some business' wifi. What's more, I suspect that the Tor community would frown upon this sort of activity.

Brilliant idea. I made almost a millibitcoin from it the other day when someone donated 10 bitcoins.

Would it be possible to use this to identify people running Tor relays?

It's already possible to identify people running Tor relays. Tor relays are publicly listed in the Tor consensus. They need to be for clients to build paths through the network.

Some relays are used as entry points to the network, and are unlisted to prevent them from being blocked by censors like many American universities, Iran, and China. These are called bridges, and they are not listed in the consensus. Since they aren't listed in the consensus, OnionTip can't be used to donate to them.

Any chance for Dogecoin support?

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