I'm Miles Richardson, one of the authors. This research was my Yale senior project, in collaboration with fellow student Mainak Ghosh, Professor Bryan Ford, and Tor community leader Rob Jansen. I thought now was a good time to post, with the EFF initiative on the front page of HN.
We will be presenting our research at the HotPETS 2014 privacy conference in Amsterdam, in July. Please come by if you can. :)
At a glance, the point of this research is to introduce an alternative cryptocurrency, called TorCoin, that rewards relays with coins for transferring bandwidth. Relay operators can then sell those coins on any altcoin exchange. TorCoin is like Bitcoin, but it's bandwidth intensive, rather than CPU intensive. So in effect, relay operators "mine" TorCoins and make money selling them on exchanges.
Let me know if you have any questions or want to discuss. The next step is developing a prototype, and/or a network simulation to run experiments. Anyone interested in helping, let me or any of the authors know. Email is [email protected]
We will be presenting our research at the HotPETS 2014 privacy conference in Amsterdam, in July. Please come by if you can. :)
At a glance, the point of this research is to introduce an alternative cryptocurrency, called TorCoin, that rewards relays with coins for transferring bandwidth. Relay operators can then sell those coins on any altcoin exchange. TorCoin is like Bitcoin, but it's bandwidth intensive, rather than CPU intensive. So in effect, relay operators "mine" TorCoins and make money selling them on exchanges.
Let me know if you have any questions or want to discuss. The next step is developing a prototype, and/or a network simulation to run experiments. Anyone interested in helping, let me or any of the authors know. Email is [email protected]