Re: [tor-relays] Discuss. Why not split donations to Tor relay owners?
gus : > Hello, > > Hi, > I wrote this advisory: > > >There is currently no concrete evidence to confirm that the funds > >deposited in this wallet will indeed be redirected to the relays. > > And your first message to the reiya guy was: > > >Me: >last two months> > > -*- > I see we are on the same page. I am not interested in running after every site where trustful people may have donated that (claims to) handle donations for relay operators. And in the world of cryptocurrencies a donation address has to be stable because funds can still end up there years later so multiple independent sites that show up and get abandoned again doesn't sound like a good idea. > If you're interested on building a project to reward relay operators, > please write a proposal and follow this process: > > https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/policies/-/blob/master/001-community-relay-operator-process.md > > New proposals are welcome for discussion. Not me but we probably should get there before the real scammers start with their "job". > However, sharing a project or > wallet saying 'donate to my wallet and I will give back to relays > operators' will be repelled. Repelling something like this without having a proper replacement suggestion or talking about this topic at places like this list is no good solution either unless you want to stop that kind people donate to Tor relay operators. Assuming reiya was an honest project and probably a one-man-show then you discouraged them. Now acting like "Look at it! I knew what was going to happen!" from your position as community lead is not totally fair. > If the project or person is coming with > good intentions, they will understand our reasons to push back. > I think they do. Let me quote them from above: "yeah definitely. ive seen pretty much everyone other than gus in that convo was positive towards the project so maybe someone more trusted can pick it up." > Important to note that there were other projects like that in the past > such as oniontip (https://github.com/DonnchaC/oniontip/). > And there were some great discussions on *how* to reward relay > operators: > > https://blog.torproject.org/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-braids-lira-tears-and-torcoin/ The last part of that blog post is the most interesting one and describes the current problems of most cryptocurrencies and other anonymity networks that make use of tokens pretty well: " Another point to make here is that most of these approaches have nothing to do with giving out or transferring real dollars. The tokens in most of these schemes are useful only to receive traffic priority in Tor. Will there be third party markets that form around the exchange of the tokens? Sure. And they may be speculated. But at the end of the day, the tokens would still only provide prioritized traffic. Depending on the configuration of the priority scheduler, the difference between priority traffic and normal traffic may not be that extreme. It is conceivable that the tokens would not be worth nearly enough to compensate an operator for the ISP connection, much less the overhead involved with updating the software, maintaining the machine, and talking with the ISP " I am not proposing to get paied for my relays (although i wouldn't fight against it). Speaking about myself, i took a look into oxen/lokinet and nym and decided that i am not going to participate there. The financial rewards were not a deciding factor for that decision. But i want donations that are supposed to go to us relay operators in fact end up in relay operators pockets. The torproject is the only party in the chain with enough power and insight to work towards that goal. A single relay operator can not do much and can not be everywhere. It's important to understand that i am not criticizing you for saying that there is no evidence that funds from projects like reiya will in fact end up at relay operators. I have no evidence to believe that they are honest and i have no evidence to believe that they are dishonest. I am criticizing you for blocking the approach of someone to organize donations towards relay operators without having a proper replacement and without taking about it in public places although the torproject seems to think about the rewarding of relay operators since at least 2009. Nine years after the last blog post about rewarding relay operators maybe it's a good time for another blogpost now? Thanks! ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Proposal: Restrict ContactInfo to Mandatory Email Address
I've been thinking long and hard about this problem and I'm not sure if an email address - validated or not - is the best way to achieve the initial goals. What are the goals of having this validated email address? 1- Inform the operator; 2- Make sure the operator will read the info; 3- Identify the operator. I'll keep #1 for last as this is the only truly needed goal from my point of view. Identifying the operator ID to make further decisions on how to share the traffic may be kind of useless. There are either _good_ operators and you have no real reason to divert traffic from these relays or there are _bad_ operators and they will try to hide that fact by creating multiple identities. Your validated IDs are still useless to you as identifying _bad_relay operators. About validating an email address to make sure the operator will read the info, it is still not a guarantee that it will happen in the future. If an operator does not want to - or cannot - read his/her emails, you cannot do anything about it. Except maybe revalidating the email address regularly which is, first, annoying and, second, what are going to do if a _good_ relay operator doesn't revalidate his/her email address? Shut down all of his/her relays? You might shoot yourself in the foot going with such an attitude. So there is no real point in validating an email. It will just turn out to be more red tape to go through. About point #1, you want to inform the relay operator. Do you need a two-way communication method for that? * How about putting the message to the operator on the _metrics.torproject.org_ relay page? * Would there be any reason for the messages not to be public? * If, somehow, a response - or an exchange - may be needed, why not put a general contact email address for answers, comments, etc. with, for example, the message ID as the subject? If the message is really personal, the message can be as simple as "Contact us at torproj...@example.org ASAP." * Why not put an RSS feed to be able to fetch those messages automatically and regularly? * That way, you can also contact multiple operators based on their country, platform, etc. with the same message as well. This would be something similar to _weather.torproject.org_ but much simpler and without a need for any kind of registration. Are you sure all operators will follow, read, and act upon your messages? Not less than by sending an email. Much better than NOT having a valid email address at all. A _bad_ operator will be a _bad_ operator no matter what. ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
