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Reduce hops when privacy level allows to save Tor network bandwidth



The following occured to me. Tor is designed to protect users from
traffic analysis by very technical adversaries. There are many use
cases where that level of protection isn't required. In those cases,
if there was a config option to reduce the number of hops in a circuit
to 2 (or possibly even 1), then users would be able to get themselves a
more responsive circuit, whilst saving the Tor network overall
bandwidth.

In a three hop circuit, when x contacts y, the Tor network ends up
having to transfer 4X the data:

x -(1)> Entry -(2)> Middle -(3)> Exit -(4)> y

In a 2 hop circuit it only has to transfer 75% of that:

x -(1)> Entry -(2)> Exit -(3)> y

-- 
Erilenz
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