Paid performance-tor option?

[Michael Holstein]

> If tor is incompetent to find HUGE funding for free, it may be time to 
> setup an international tor paid option.

Many of TORs current high-bandwidth nodes are run by universities .. who 
would be legally prohibited from participating in a for-profit system 
(even if the model was just cost recovery). It's also a lot easier to 
sell the idea of exposing yourself to endless abuse complaints if you 
can use the "...but we're helping Chinese dissidents..." angle.

If you want paid-for anonymity services, there's tons to choose from .. 
but consider that once you attach payment to a username, you've created 
an easily attributable path back to you. TOR from the coffee shop's wifi 
is a lot harder to trace.

I guess it depends on *why* you need the performance .. if it's p2p 
you're trying to do (which you shouldn't be doing on TOR anyway) I'd 
suggest you take a look at what the friendly pirates at PRQ have come up 
with (Relakks .. www.relakks.com).

Cheers,

Michael Holstein
Cleveland State University