Re: [tor-talk] Flattor: A practical crowdfunded Flattr-like incentive scheme for Tor relays

[Moritz Bartl <moritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On 17.08.2013 17:52, adrelanos wrote:
>> I am sure there is a clever scientific term for the phenomenon that when you
>> start paying *some* of your volunteers, others are gonna look and ask, "huh
>> wait a second, we're all doing the same work, yet the other guy now gets paid,
>> and I am just supposed to keep doing this for free? Screw that."
> Yeah, I read about that phenomenon as well. If you'll add money to add,
> you change the nature of the service and fewer people want to volunteer
> out of civil courage.

We tried to have that discussion quite some time ago, when the
Torproject relay funding was announced [1]. I hoped for more
participation, but in the end I had to come up with a scheme.

It is indeed a tough problem, but I guess we have to try and see how it
works out. In the end, it is/would be about covering parts of actual
*costs* of infrastructure, not the time people volunteer to maintain it.
It is already the case that (large) parts of the Tor network are funded
by donations or sponsorship. I do hope that the call for more diversity
(and ever-growing needs for moar bandwidth) does not draw away too many
volunteers.

A second problem we're facing with relay reimbursement is that we don't
want anyone to actually depend on the reimbursement. We will release
more information shortly (sorry, I don't have the time to write a more
detailed mail right now), but I hope we designed it so that it limits
this issue.

[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/turning-funding-more-exit-relays etc
-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/
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