I don’t think people here dislike crypto for its stated goals, but because current implementations don’t live up to those goals and have some serious defects. The hype doesn’t match the reality, which makes crypto feel more like a speculative market than a solution to a problem.

Things take time. Which industry matured that quickly? Anyhow, stuff like Monero are actively suppressed by regulation and central exchanges. That's a political problem.

Monero is just a digital currency anyway, similar to Bitcoin if Bitcoin had cheap transactions. You can hardly run anything on the network. Something like Ethereum might be an option once it scales properly and when transaction costs come down. I do agree there needs to be a financial incentive to run nodes. A blockchain which does not discriminate in terms of applications running on it could be very valuable in the future. Privacy is important, not just from a civil rights point of view but for businesses too. There's a reason corporations care about IT security and encryption.

There was a pretty nice project a few years ago, awarding Bitcoin to Tor node operators called Oniontip [1]. All Tor operators had to do was to add a Bitcoin address to their Tor contact info. Donors would transfer Bitcoin to a Oniontip-operated Bitcoin address and Oniontip would regularly pay out the Tor operators proportional to the bandwidth they provided to Tor.

That did work remarkably well, but unfortunately the author lost interest at some point and took the whole project down.

[1]: https://github.com/DonnchaC/oniontip

OK, I'm curious, how would this work out in practice?

The first reservation that comes to mind for me is concerns about crypto ledgers being more pseudonymous than anonymous. If I start using a cryptocurrency to tip exit node operators, that creates an immutable, publicly visible paper trail linking my presence on TOR back to me. Not exactly the kind of thing I'd be eager to sign up for if I'm trying to hide my tracks.

It also moves things toward a situation where digital privacy is reserved for people who can afford to pay for it, which strikes me as running directly counter to the principles the TOR project is supposed to be upholding.

How would you "prove" that someone is hosting a non-malicious node? I assume it can be done (cf gridcoin, filecoin, namecoin).

It needs to be verifiable to be protected from spoofing, and encrypted to be protected from listening. You can't verify arbitrary network traffic because servers aren't stateless, but you can encrypt some traffic (https). Sadly, the encrypted traffic still has some metadata, such as server ip, sometimes hostname, request size.

Either way, it can't be protected in the way filecoin/gridcoin are protected.

I think the idea was to reward all exit nodes, to provide an incentive for doing so that doesn't involve malicious behavior. Hopefully that would drown the malicious nodes in a sea of non-malicious operators who are here for the cryptocurrency rewards.

Of course a way to prove you are not malicious would be great but I don't see how you can prove that using technology.

I believe Orchid [1] was one of the first decentralised VPNs to have multi-hop, but I'm not sure if it uses onion routing.

[1] https://www.orchid.com/

I think HN is generally positive towards Monero.

Wouldn't the possession/spending of that currency strongly imply I run a node? I think it might be self-defeating.

Can you host an exit node anonymously? I would assume it's not much better than the privacy offered by Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies.