<story><title>Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy</title><url>https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarruda</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;m curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node?&lt;p&gt;If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>susan_segfault</author><text>(with the understanding that I&amp;#x27;m only speaking for what I found, not for the Tor project or the relay community)&lt;p&gt;Most of the people I spoke to saw themselves as providing a service - they wanted to help do something to bring a particular kind of future Internet about and found it rewarding to be a part of that. A number of them found the act of running a relay interesting and fun in itself - something they could get better at. Plus, membership of the relay community itself (especially now) is a kind of shared experience of community - and that&amp;#x27;s attractive to people in itself.&lt;p&gt;In terms of malicious actors, Tor does a lot to avoid this, from hunting down bad relays actively, monitoring the network as best as it can, continuously developing the algorithms which select routes through the network, and other mechanisms, like forcing relays to operate for a while before they get trusted with a lot of connections.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy</title><url>https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tarruda</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;m curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node?&lt;p&gt;If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>LordDragonfang</author><text>People can do things altruistically - there doesn&amp;#x27;t always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive. Lots of people run exit nodes because they believe in privacy and freedom of information.&lt;p&gt;That said, you&amp;#x27;re absolutely right about large entities being able to control a large number of nodes, which is why a great number of nodes are controlled by governments trying to do so and also prevent foreign adversaries from being able to.</text></comment>