I think if more peopled used TOR, and also ran public exit nodes and/or relays, it will work better than private VPN companies.

Afaik, Tor is not recommended for high bandwidth activities like bittorrent and streaming. I'm sure it works, but probably would break the network if too much of it went on. I'd be happy to know this never was the case or changed. Its the reason I never got on the tor bandwagon.

Trying to stream video over tor is a terrible experience, even if you stay within tor onion sites and don't rely on the too-few-and-too-overloaded exit nodes

bittorrent as a protocol isn't even any more secure over Tor, so you're just taking up bandwidth on the network by using it. Direct downloads and streaming may be less of a concern, but it's probably too slow right now to really do streaming effectively.

The fundamental problem with this is that it's charity / freeloading. I don't mean this as an ethical complaint, just that the economic incentive isn't there.

I could imagine cryptocurrency potentially offering a solution to this which solves both issues of trust and economics, but it would be a challenge to guarantee its security.

I seem to remember implementations like this already being in formation. Jay Freeman (aka saurik) is working on one called Orchid with a handful of other big names IIRC. I think I read about it here on YC.

It would be easy to make the Tor browser also a tor node. This would unfortunately however have negative effects for users depending on secrecy, I think.

it would be nice if TOR had reciprocity where a user using it will also donate some network bandwidth. But i guess that might not really work since it forces you to run an exit node, which is where the dangers of running TOR is currently.

That's not actually true; nodes can be non-exit and relay only. This helps insofar as to reduce the relaying load on the exits too.

> For PH it makes sense due to them already have infra to support it especially video streaming

It is not their infrastructure.

They appear to be using this white-label service according to code in the app (verified by looking at network traffic): https://wlvpn.com/