

OnionTip – Donate to volunteers who are running Tor relays - huitseeker
https://oniontip.com

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

~~~
sinak
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.

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

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malanj
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)

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

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

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benologist
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
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?

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

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

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

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derefr
_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.)

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zaroth
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...

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shangxiao
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)

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sine_dicendo
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
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.

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

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

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tedks
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.

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aw3c2
Any chance for Dogecoin support?

