On 06/09/2014 08:26 PM, Virgil Griffith wrote:
For a while I've been seeking to grow the Tor network in both size and goodput. Towards this end, I've explored various avenues such as increasing user-awareness via tor2web. More recently, I've been exploring financial incentives like TorCoin.
This is great that you care about growing the Tor network. Thanks for the thoughts.
However, can we please, please stop using Tor in the name of everything? Our trademark lawyers love the business, but we'd rather spend money on developers and improving tor; not defending our name to keep everyone from being confused as to what is the real Tor or not. People, press, and companies are already calling us at Tor thinking we wrote torcoin and have approved it. We did not write torcoin nor do we approve of it (as far as I know).
The most relevant of these papers (Lacetera 2013) cites the major motivations for volunteer labor are: "pure altruism, warm glow, self-image, and reputation". Upon reading this I realized TorCoin's technical interestingness had blinded me to much easier to leverage motivations of "warm glow" and "reputation".
Perhaps join the EFF's Tor Challenge? https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/ They would love the help.