Yes, you asked the cardinal question. Tor and I2P critically rely on donations. Incentive design has been an unsolved problem for decades. Bittorrent advanced

Yes, you asked the cardinal question. Tor and I2P critically rely on donations. Incentive design has been an unsolved problem for decades. Bittorrent advanced the field with a very simple and effective T4T. There is a famous blogpost from 2014 giving the state-of-the-art in privacy-enhancing technology incentives: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-braids-lira-tears-and-torcoin https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-rou... I'm leading a research group at a university who has worked on this since 2007, see our initial collaborative work with Harvard University "Bandwidth as a Currency": https://www.google.com/webhp?q=bandwidth+as+a+currency https://www.google.com/webhp?q=bandwidth+as+a+currency We need "privacy credits/coins" if we want Tor/I2P/Tribler to scale to numerous millions of users.