Tor history and technology, was Re: Dishonest Tor relay math question

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

> As to constant bandwidth/covertraffic, that is expensive even today. For
> constant bandwidth to get a 5 second response time for a smallish say
> 3MB web page you need to have 3 MB of covertraffic every 5 seconds, or
> 50GB per day, per link. Ouch.

I thought about this a little bit, and the concern doesn't add up to me.

As a consumer and participant in small businesses, I've only ever seen
bandwidth that is metered per availability, not per use. The price is
the same whether I use it or not.

The amount of bandwidth available to a set of people who stream videos
with or without filling the downtime with cover traffic is exactly the
same.

A low-end consumer link that provides 1MB/s bandwidth does indeed
provide 84GB of transfer every day.

The idea of constant bandwidth could of course be extended to manage
changing bandwidth conditions without providing for timing
correlation, so long as the use of the bandwidth is unrelated to the
actual requests, it could have any arbitrary shape to fit within
availability.