[tor-relays] Relay with VPN

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 02:23:38PM +0200, s7r wrote:
> as well as disadvantages:
> 
> - you will have higher latency;
> - the bandwidth of your relay will be of the speed of the VPN itself,
> and shared VPN usually are slow for high grade server connections that
> run 24x7 with constant bandwidth usage;

Another disadvantage to consider: if you run your relay via a VPN, then
you are expanding the surface area of who around the internet gets to
see the Tor traffic flowing through your relay. It's encrypted, yes, but
encryption doesn't hide traffic characteristics like timing and volume.

So it's not just a performance issue, it's also a security issue. The
farther away from your relay the VPN is, the more the traffic is
traversing parts of the network it doesn't really need to, and the more
appealing it becomes to instead "just run a relay where the VPN is".

--Roger