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

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

>> Up to a point, yes. In most cases that point is 25GB/month, after which
>> your traffic gets throttled. Unmetered lower bandwidth contracts also
>> exist, but don't help enough.
>>
>>
>> However, you miss my point - the requirement is 50GB per day, *per link*.
>>
>> Imagine you are a TOR entry node. If you are serving 1,000 people -
>> which is not a whole lot - you need to serve 50 TB of dummy traffic per
>> day.
>
> This is only true if these people are all using the network at
> precisely the same time and are all given 1MB/s at that same time. The
> maximum total bandwidth needed at any given moment is the same with or
> without cover traffic: it is the sum of the most bandwidth needed by
> people simultaneously. At this maximal moment, no cover traffic is
> needed: the users are each others’ cover traffic.
>
> At other moments you need to provide enough cover traffic such that
> that moment is indistinguishable from any other. But it’s still
> maximally that same amount of bandwidth with or without cover traffic.
> I proposed making all moments be that maximal moment, because the
> network transceiver is powered and capable anyway.

When i responded to this, I didn’t understand that Peter was referring
to the “last mile” of connection to each user, where users are
distinguishable by their different source ips, with each user engaging
constant bandwidth to hide themselves. To provide for constant
bandwidth in this area the network would need to have users split
their transfers among multiple entry nodes, such that each one has
less bandwidth connected total, or otherwise anonymize its users.

If each user connected to 10 entry nodes, for example, then each entry
node would only have to hold 1/10th the maximum bandwidth per user to
have constant bandwidth with them. In comparison, P2P apps might have
100 or 1000 connections.

Noting also that tor used to place users as first class routers,
although whenever I left this running bad things would happen to my
machine while I was away. And that constant bandwidth is the extreme
ideal situation that could be compromised with other distributions in
areas where existing network architecture (identifiable user
connections) make the system more challenging.