Users pay its yearly fee via Bitcoin. Once a year.
Tor client authenticates to entry node with wallet ID. Node checks in blockchain that fee's been paid and forwards traffic.
Plus - clean nodes operated by trusted Tor project team.
Minus - experts need review that wallet checking is not a deal breaker. I have not really thought this through, just throwing ideas :))
But it does not kills the idea, imho. Buying and paying coins anonymously is a different, independent area.
Came to my mind that this subscription model may spawn several Tor networks, trust whichever you want, like with VPN providers. Just keep the Tor code maintained by the public.
And several networks may use each other's nodes ... Cyberpunk in its best
i'm in a similar position. i find crypto interesting but i don't understand it well enough to be confident about the anonymity provided. a concern i have is that people are already looking for ways to deanonymize crypto wallets and tor users separately. to link tor to crypto wallets would seem to increase the attack surface to deanonymize tor users. i'll leave it to those more knowledgeable than me to say how much of a risk this really is.
again, i do think it is very important for the long term viability of tor to create more incentive for users to support it financially.
Yeah, that was the idea, nothing grows without money. Trust me, people will pay money for Tor once model is proven to be secure and anonymous.
There is private networking, Tor, but it needs private money to run.
There is private money, coins, but it needs private networking to run.
Lets merge them together, somehow :) Onion Coin need to be established in .onion domain only, dark web (onion) exchanges converting Onions to 'meat' (a.k.a IPV4) internet coins, to pay for Tor nodes.
Got me googling stuff (yeah, shut up), found deeponion.org - cryptocurrency sent through the TOR :)
... time machines and Part 2. I Love this guy :)