> Lots of people run exit nodes because they believe in privacy and freedom of information.

I used to do that. But I've ultimately decided that the prospect of fighting accusations of abuse or crimes committed through my network wasn't that enticing. Proponents will try to downplay the risks by using vague ideological nonsense like "don't worry, an IP doesn't legally represent a person ;)" which, even if true, won't prevent a rather unpleasant ordeal.

Running a relay is likely fairly low-risk and still a good thing for the network, though.

> People can do things altruistically - there doesn't always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive.

For a few years Oniontip [1] allowed tipping Tor relay operators with Bitcoin. In my opinion that was a quite nice combination of technologies, as it allowed to anonymously tip operators of a service providing anonymity on the internet.

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

Bit coin is not anonymous. It is literally a ledger of every transaction ever made. Monero is what you want if you value anonymity.

I mean, bitcoin is a lot more anonymous if you host your own wallet and don't cash out through an exchange (or don't cash out at all) - you're just a number. That's definitely not the modal use case today (where its primary use is as a vehicle for ~~gambling~~financial speculation denominated in dollars), but was a lot more common 10 years ago when that project was created.

Or you just use a crypto currency with anonymity build in.

Sure, but that was probably pretty hard to do ten years ago when this was being developed, because, y'know, Monero didn't exist yet (or had only existed for a few months and had no users)

Also, bitcoin actually was more private back then, because KYC rules were much more lax.