From Onions to Shallots: Rewarding Tor Relays with TEARS

[cryptocurrencylive]

http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/hotpets14-tears.pdf

From Onions to Shallots: Rewarding Tor Relays with TEARS

"Abstract.

The Tor anonymity network depends on volunteers to oper- ate relays, and might oer higher bandwidth with lower response laten- cies if more users could be incentivized to contribute relay bandwidth.We introduce TEARS, a system rewarding useful service with trac prior- ity. TEARS audits relays and rewards them with anonymous coins called Shallots, proportionally to bandwidth contributed. Shallots may be re- deemed anonymously for PriorityPasses, which in turn may be presented to relays to request trac priority. The PriorityPass construction enables relays to prevent double spending locally without leaking information. Unlike previous incentive proposals, TEARS incorporates transparent and distributed banking using protocols from distributed digital cryp- tocurrency systems like Bitcoin. Shallots are publicly-veriable, minimiz- ing reliance on and trust in banking authorities, making them auditable while naturally distributing bank functionality and associated overhead. Further, these distributed banking protocols resist denial-of-service at- tacks and can recover from catastrophic failures. TEARS may either be deployed in the existing Tor network or operate alongside it."


Source - http://cryptocurrencylive.com/item?id=9081

[Este Nuno]

That's actually pretty interesting and seems like a clever idea. I'm not really a big TOR user but I do know that it's notoriously slow. And rewarding people who contribute to the network with increased speed via those priority passes seems like a pretty good idea.

Is this actually going to be implemented on the network, or is this more of just a theoretical thing?