the most likely mechanism i've heard proposed for agoric load balancing
is the use of 'hashcash' which is asymmetrically expensive, it costs the
sender more than the receiver, to be sure, not a huge amount, but it's a
way to allow users originating traffic from a server node to be
prioritised by the network at the cost of computation. exactly how to
implement it in tor has yet to be defined, but it seemed to me like a
damn good solution to the problem.
On Fri, 23 Dec 2005 22:37:33 -0500, "Roger Dingledine" <arma@xxxxxxx>
said:
On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 11:21:34PM -0400, Matt Thorne wrote:
I know that no one wants to do this, but out of curiosity could a tit
for tat mechanism be built into the tor client? I realize that this
wouldn't be desirable, just curiosity.
It would be desirable, but it's a bit tricky. We need to a) design a tit
for tat mechanism that encourages good behavior, b) assess its impact
on anonymity and fix it until we're happy, and c) do some (possibly
significant) architecture changes on Tor so we can provide better service
to some servers or on some circuits.
Please read section 5.1 of
http://tor.eff.org/doc/design-paper/challenges.pdf
I'm collaborating with Dan Wallach at Rice University on a small NSF
project to look into this. I hope to have some answers in a month or two.
--Roger