[tor-relays] Less Traffic on my relay

[Drake Wilson]

Tor Zilla wrote:
> You are right. I am using a DSL connection and my IP keeps changing often....
> 
> What i am going to do is setup a bridge instead of a non exit relay and watch how much i can contribute to the community.

Sorry for jumping in---I'm seen this a few times and wonder whether it's really a good
approach.  AFAIK, bridge addresses are often distributed through less reliable and
higher-latency means, since the point is that clients can't just look them up via directory
servers.  If hosting bridges on unstable IP addresses is frequent, I'd expect users who _need_
them to start experiencing "obtain bridge address via highly rate-limited and possibly dangerous
mechanism; it becomes unusable within a short period of time; no good way to know where it went
because Tor access is already gone; go back into the breach again and possibly be denied
further addresses or risk getting caught".

So I'd think the effective stability requirements for a bridge, especially for IP address
stability (maybe not for other kinds of stability?), are higher than for an "ordinary" relay
for it to be a net positive.

I see some posts on the Tor blog from a few years ago about trying to figure out how to
compensate for this, and I saw some tickets about getting metrics about bridge address
stability, but I haven't seen anything about good solutions yet.  Is this logic sound, or
have I missed something important?

   ---> Drake Wilson