[tor-relays] specifying your own entrance and exit nodes

[Seth <list@xxxxxxxxx>]

Assuming there are certain Tor notes being run by parties hostile to my  
own interests, what are
the pros and cons of specifying one's own list of trusted entrance and  
exit nodes?

I run a Tor relay at home 24/7 and use that as my entrance point. I do  
this to provide cover traffic for my own Tor use as well as help out the  
network.

I also try to use Tor for all my daily web browsing when possible. This  
has given be a lot of headaches.

Besides the demoralizing barrage of Cloudfare captchas, I've had a lot of  
problems with dropped connections, timeouts, SSL cert warnings, fatal  
errors connecting to HTTPS sites. I started to get a gut feeling,  
warranted or not, that some exits nodes might be meddling with my traffic.

To combat this I changed the configuration on my local Tor relay to use  
only exit nodes run by organizations or people that I felt I could trust.  
I didn't bother with specifying entrance nodes because I could not see  
what the gain would be.

This seems to have curbed some of the problems, with the tradeoff that  
responsiveness is much more inconsistent.

I'm just curious if restricting exit nodes to a few dozen that you trust  
effectively defeats most of the purpose of using Tor. What would be the  
bare minimum of Tor exit nodes a person would need to use in order to make  
life difficult for the Panopticon surveillor scum?

If this post is more appropriate for Tor-talk, please let me know
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