Re: Marketing Tor (Was Re: For those using Tor with windows)

[Anthony DiPierro <or@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/16/05, Nick Mathewson <nickm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ethically: I think it's a little bit dubious to re-sell bandwidth that
> others are giving away for free and contribute nothing in return.
>
Certainly if you're reselling it directly, without adding anything of
value yourself.  Of course, if people don't want to allow reselling,
then they should restrict the service to those who agree not to
resell.

> Strategically: It's self-defeating.  If the service remains small, it
> probably won't be very profitable. If it becomes large, then it will
> strain the network, performance will degrade, and their users will
> leave.  Of course, there's a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario here,
> where everybody has it in their interest to extract more than they
> contribute, but our design has this problem anyway. (See summary in
> 3.3. of http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/design-paper/challenges.pdf .)
>
I think this is inevitable anyway, at least without a partial
redesign.  Something as simple as balancing the load so that peer
nodes which contribute the most get priority through your nodes would
probably solve that problem to a large extent (think tit-for-tat).

If you don't want people using your resources without giving anything
back, don't let them.