incentives

One big challenge to making Tor fast is providing incentives for users to act as relays. So far we've been getting more relays by 1) building community through interacting more with relay operators, listing the fast ones prominently in the Tor status pages, and generally making it clear that you will make the Tor network better if you do, and 2) making it really easy to configure and run a relay by adding a simple GUI interface in Vidalia and adding UPnP support. But we should also consider more direct incentive approaches, for example where Tor is faster for you if you're a relay.

There are two papers that came out in 2008 that everybody pondering incentives in Tor should read. The first is "Building Incentives into Tor", a tech report I coauthored with Johnny Ngan and Dan Wallach from Rice University (update: now it's an FC 2010 paper). The second is "Payment for Anonymous Routing", published at PETS 2008 by Androulaki et al from Columbia University. read more »