[tor-relays] Minimum requirements for becoming a guard

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Dec 25, 2016 at 09:47:02AM +0200, Rana wrote:
> What are the absolute minimum requirements for becoming a guard? 
>  
> [I am not asking about being trustworthy which I am obviously not, only
> about bandwidth etc. :)]

The requirements are relative to the other relays in the network:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n2289

In short, there are three requirements:

A) You need to be up for most of the time, compared to the other
relays. Right now that's 98% weighted-fractional-uptime.

B) You need to get in the top 25% of the relays by speed. "Speed" in
this case refers to consensus weights for recent enough authorities, or
the number advertised in your relay descriptor for older authorities.
Right now that varies by authority but it's in the 4 million to 7
million range.

C) You need to have been around at least 8 days.

You can see the thresholds per authority in their votes:
https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/moria1-v3-status-votes

And I've just opened a ticket for consensus-health to display them
in a more friendly way:
https://consensus-health.torproject.org/
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21079

Hey, can somebody look through tor.stackexchange.com and see if this
question has already been asked, and if so, if this answer here is the
best answer we've got, and add them both? :) Thanks!

--Roger