On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 15:39:55 -0700 Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:
The villains here are writers of the Tor Project website. They bullshit users, overselling Tor. Why, I don't know. Maybe it's all a honeypot. Or maybe they're just idiots.
Notice that they get paid as long as tor exists. So even if tor was not a honeypot, and they are not idiots, they still have a fundamental incentive to oversell it. Their paychecks. Also, syverson and co. are complicit in overselling tor, despite the fact that their papers for the 'technical intelligentsia' spell out the limitations.
I've wondered whether it's just that they need lots of users for cover traffic. That _was_ a major factor in opening Tor to the public, instead of restricting it to government users. But that seems unlikely, now, given that the NSA etc could easily run enough bots on hacked servers.
My guess is that the main reason for them to get as many users as they can is to justify funding. Hell, maybe they even get a percentage of funding directly proportional to number of users/network size.