We propose that Tor supports the purchase of its services. Onion routing, and in particular the Tor network, is technically well-designed to provide communications privacy. However, the resource constraints of a volunteer network result in unacceptable performance for many users. As a consequence, many users turn to paid services, but even when available they aren't ideal solutions. For example, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are often used for anonymous communication and censorship avoidance. However, VPNs are not designed to work against an active or state-level adversary and present a fragile single source of trust, as well as suffering from more subtle flaws [1]. As another example, users hide peer-to-peer file sharing via "seedboxes" that run the P2P protocol at a paid host. However, accessing such services is recognizable, and these solutions again present a single source of trust.
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