But TOR isn’t really any more decentralized than the internet; and it might even be less decentralized due to exit node contention. Decentralization does not se

But TOR isn’t really any more decentralized than the internet; and it might even be less decentralized due to exit node contention. Decentralization does not seem to have anything to do with TOR’s relatively slow speed, nor does decentralization seem to have any “thermodynamic principle” of slowing things down, right? The extra complexity of TOR is precisely the thing slowing it down, by design. (Well one of the things, scarce bandwidth is another - there have always been calls & pleas for more participation in order to increase the network’s bandwidth & capacity.) We can’t exactly compare Netflix to an unnamed slow torrent of your choice in any fair or reasonable way given that Netflix is something like 15% of all internet traffic and is heavily optimized. The fair comparison is using BitTorrent to download a file compared to a direct http or ftp download from the original source/host - and for that BitTorrent usually wins handily in my experience. Plus I’ve definitely seen some popular torrents download much faster than anything Netflix has ever served me, in terms of bytes per second.