Comment by alfiedotwtf a day ago
If it’s that expensive to run Tor nodes, who is actually paying for them? I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals. Corporates too wouldn’t want this type of burden… so is it really just spy-vs-spy
This is probably strictly true but it smacks to me of 'many people say'. I wonder what % of TOR nodes are run by people with an ideological allegiance for the network vs how many are run by nation-state actors.
only exit nodes get there door kicked in and they are the minority and not needed for the tor network to function
Unless something has changed, one of the issues with Tor is that it tries to send traffic through servers that have the most bandwidth which are pretty much certain to be servers owned by the state a lot of the time because a random person's residential cable modem is going to be a lot less capable.
Many individuals contribute to running relays. And there are non-profit organizations collecting donations to operates Tor exit nodes:
- https://www.torservers.net/
- https://nos-oignons.net/