Some kind of economics are needed to over come the fact that there are only a few thousand Tor nodes [0], making it relatively easy to compromise the network by any entity willing to pay for a couple of thousand nodes [1], which is a bargain for any intelligence service.
I.e. Tor is pretty safe, but because it’s volunteer, it is also a bit of a honeypot.
Now take all the money people spend on commercial VPN’s, and anonymize accounts while making some privacy first crypto actually useful to the general public.
Millions of nodes, or tens of millions.
The benefits come not just from linear node path anonymity.
By spreading traffic packets in parallel across different paths, and geographically, so it’s near impossible to track anything useful even with a lot of compromised nodes.
Assuming you have a LOT of nodes.
(Geography here meaning Internet topology, verified by minimal latency.
Topological information for millions of nodes will help keep latency low, while increasing the number of nodes in each path, for a better security vs. latency trade off.
So nodes could be incentivized to locate and scale based on topology & usage.)
If there is a way to make Tor anywhere near that secure a lot of people would like to know how.
Economics matter, and this money is being spent already.
