At Tue Aug 4 20:16:17 UTC 2015 by Jannis Wiese mail at janniswiese.com

Strange thing: My relay [0] is speeding up since then significantly (finally!!)

That's because with no BWauth quorum the consensus algorithm reverts to using self-measured bandwidth with a ceiling of 10000.

This causes the weight super-fast relays to drop substantially and provides a corresponding boost to middle and slower relays. Also puts most of the 450 Unmeasured=1 relays back in the game.

In addition, this state eliminates all the crazy-stupid-buggy behavior of the BWauths that has been vexing operators so much. Only losers are the folks with huge bandwidth + CPU + tweaking in their relays, but the drop is not all that terrible.

I've been watching this for two-plus days now and the Tor network rather runs better this way. Looks like no more than 50-100 relays are in the category where the weight is cut substantially, and plenty of unused capacity exists in the other 3000 or useable relays to make up the difference.

Unfortunately the BWauths will likely be back due to the problem of adversarial gaming of the self-measure values. Even with a cap of 10000 someone will figure out ways to abuse the old pre-2009 approach of balancing the network.

One can only hope that enough of the bugs have been worked out that BWauths will be behaving better going forward.