5 ms·

OnionTip – Donate to volunteers who are running Tor relays

149 points by huitseeker 12y ago

BillFranklin 12y ago
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-1635-tor-relays https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/tor-challenge-inspires...
- shangxiao 12y ago
  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.
- sinak 12y ago
  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.
  - mbrubeck 12y ago
    For a high-bandwidth relay (>1MBps) you also get a t-shirt!
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Personally, the rewards were secondary: the drive mainly just reminded me to set up permanent relays, so I did. :-)
morrad 12y ago
Would it be possible to use this to identify people running Tor relays?
- tedks 12y ago
  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.
benologist 12y ago
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.
- roywiggins 12y ago
  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?
  - benologist 12y ago
    Bitcoin is perfect if the goal is that 99% of the world can't donate.
    - baddox 12y ago
      I imagine that more than 1% of people who are aware of Tor have bitcoins or can easily obtain them.
      - benologist 12y ago
        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 https://www.torproject.org/press/press.html.en
malanj 12y ago
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)
- ivanca 12y ago
  They don't need money; they already get millions (maybe billions?) from American taxes.
  - thejosh 12y ago
    The point the GP making is that the create the air of legitimacy they will list here.
haakon 12y ago
Brilliant idea. I made almost a millibitcoin from it the other day when someone donated 10 bitcoins.
aw3c2 12y ago
Any chance for Dogecoin support?
shangxiao 12y ago
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 https://twitter.com/BitcoinNews3/status/516097500755668992
sine_dicendo 12y ago
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
- simoncion 12y ago
  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.
zaroth 12y ago
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...

149 points by huitseeker 12y ago

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-1635-tor-relays https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/tor-challenge-inspires...

shangxiao 12y ago
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.
sinak 12y ago
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.
- mbrubeck 12y ago
  For a high-bandwidth relay (>1MBps) you also get a t-shirt!
scott_karana 12y ago
Personally, the rewards were secondary: the drive mainly just reminded me to set up permanent relays, so I did. :-)

morrad 12y ago

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

tedks 12y ago
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.

benologist 12y ago

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.

roywiggins 12y ago
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?
- benologist 12y ago
  Bitcoin is perfect if the goal is that 99% of the world can't donate.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I imagine that more than 1% of people who are aware of Tor have bitcoins or can easily obtain them.
    - benologist 12y ago
      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 https://www.torproject.org/press/press.html.en

malanj 12y ago

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)

ivanca 12y ago
They don't need money; they already get millions (maybe billions?) from American taxes.
- thejosh 12y ago
  The point the GP making is that the create the air of legitimacy they will list here.

haakon 12y ago

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

aw3c2 12y ago

Any chance for Dogecoin support?

shangxiao 12y ago

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 https://twitter.com/BitcoinNews3/status/516097500755668992

sine_dicendo 12y ago

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

simoncion 12y ago
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.

zaroth 12y ago

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...