Comment by bauruine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bauruine | Hacker News Reader

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Tor relies on the IPv4 scarcity to make Sybil attacks more expensive but is slowly moving away from it e.g. the number of allowed relays per IP was recently doubled from 2 to 4 and it may get doubled in the near future again.

>Roger Dingledine does claim to "personally have met" 2/3rds of them

Hey said that he knew 2/3 in the beginning so 10 years+ ago and that it's no longer the case but he would like to increase the number of relay operator he or others of the Tor Project knows again. There are in person relay operator meetups at conferences (e.g Chaos Communication Congress) and I assume that he met most of the people at such occasions. I'm not sure why this should be terrifying.

>whitelist model (which is how Tor manages their high-risk exit nodes)

I'm not sure if this ever was the case but exit nodes aren't threatened specially than other relays and there is no whitelist model for them.

FWIW, he had told me that five years ago. I fully admit 5 is as close to 10 as it is to 0, though ;P. But like, even if he was stuck using an old stat the idea that he wants to know all of them isn't confidence inspiring from this angle. I asked him what he would do if someone came to him with a lead pipe and threatened him with a demand to poison his directory server and he seemed confident until I asked him the same question about his family and it frankly felt like he hadn't really considered it before, which was crazy to me.

The point being, though, that Tor isn't really a decentralized design as the cabal is too small and the community is too tight: I am just listing it as a thing that clearly isn't decentralized and anonymous / permissionless in one place (the servers) and just kind of throws up its hands at the issue of dealing with a bratty set of users; it works because, by and large, not many people want to use it and not enough people are unhappy enough that it exists to DoS it out of existence.

I think he said it sometimes after KAX17 so around 2022 but honestly I'm not exactly sure since when he doesn't know that much anymore maybe it has been till a few years ago and not 10.

Yeah you're right it's a small group with a lot power. I have no solution to make it decentralized but I'm pretty sure if the solution includes "money" it's not a solution I like.

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