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

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

On 6/6/23, Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many
<gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

I thought about this a little further and memories are filling in
where there used to be plans where a set transfer cap would become
exhausted and replenish at the end of the month, like mobile plans
have nowadays.

Still, it's clear the problem is slowly being engaged in non-tor
alternatives. [when anonymity is truly needed, it's life and death.
snail-mail response times don't matter in such situations, and it's a
huge demand for some that does indeed continue]

> 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.
>