# Roger Dingledine [Tor] & Kurt Opsahl [Filecoin Foundation] fireside at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress

- Speakers: [Roger Dingledine](https://streameth.org/speakers/roger-dingledine)
- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 29:40
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-LoiyYL_gsYA
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoiyYL_gsYA

## Description

Roger Dingledine [Tor] & Kurt Opsahl [Filecoin Foundation] discuss Tor, anti-surveillance challenges, cypherpunk culture, original Tor network design, incentivization at Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress, Bangkok 11.11

Facilitated by the Web3Privacy now collective: https://www.web3privacy.info
Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress: https://congress.web3privacy.info
X: https://x.com/web3privacy

## Transcript

I think um you all are probably familiar with the with the tour project uh but let's let's start out I guess maybe we'll go into what is the origin story of the tour pro how did it come about yeah so hi everybody is my microphone working sounds like yes great so I'm Roger dingledine I started tour long ago I wrote the program called tour uh helped to create the nonprofit and have had a lot of different uh hats over the years the original version uh the the way that tour came about I was working on an anonymous publishing design that's not too different than the file coin thing that I was chatting with Kurt about earlier uh for my thesis back in 2000 and I ended up going to a conference a privacy research conference where I was presenting the uh basically Anonymous data Haven design that I was working on and I met the onion routing researchers from the US Naval Research lab and uh ended up getting uh a contract from them to help them write research papers and so there was no code involved there was no like uh T didn't exist yet but in my world part of what you're doing when you're writing research papers is you build it to actually see if you're write so I built tour as part of the the process of writing those research papers and that's how uh that's how the original world came to be so yes uh the naval research lab still has researchers who are working on it it's great that they're doing that but the actual code for tour did not come from the government it came from me very good and but I mean let's let's let's uh talk about that a little bit so I mean actually first of all I say where where did you go uh right after the the working with the naval people uh was it oh yes so the we had some funding from uh DARPA like the US military to do the research papers and that lasted for a year or two and then as all Government funding uh happens it lasts for a little bit and then it disappears and then we had no funding for a little while and then the Electronic Frontier Foundation eff.org decided that we were so important that they needed us to continue existing at the time I think it was the the file sharing stuff it was the napers of the world and they were worried that there was going to be a lawsuit that uh that prevented people from having uh programs on the internet that could move files around and we were a good use case for actually people do need privacy to do good things in the world and you can't make that illegal because you would also make Torah illegal was the the the plan they were going to use in their legal defense yeah and and that and that is how I first met Roger that eff at the time so you know see you you wrote the Cod the code uh and uh I know I trust you I know you I've known you for a very long time but how does someone who doesn't know you trust this how do you build trust in a in a system uh by the design yeah so that's a that's a a broad topic which is it's a good match for the cypherpunk world that we're talking about today uh one answer is the Tor Network is based on relays run by many thousands of volunteers around the world so uh the actual operation of the network your tour client uh pulls down a list of all the relays and then builds a path through three of them and as long as those relays aren't collaborating uh and it's a bit more complicated than that but as long as uh things don't all get together to collude against you then nobody gets to learn that this user went to that destination so in that sense it isn't about me I'm not the one like helping you browse the web over tour it's a network of many thousands of decentralized volunteers but that said there is code and I started I I wrote it originally but now there are more people who work on it so part of the answer for that is we need transparency not just it's free software and open source of course it is not just here are the design documents here are the research papers of course we should publish that but also as a community hi I'm Roger I will identify myself and and happy to chat with you afterwards about uh about any any tour things and that community building is a key part to how the trust works you can't just write soft software and give yourself a pseudonym and stick it on the internet and then have a a trustworthy Global Network there's a there there are Decades of community building that are needed all right and so in in its design uh one one of the things we we we've talked about is the the challenges if you have a privacy practive techology that is only used by a small set of people whether it's the government using it to uh hide their identities to go around or maybe it's criminals are using it or maybe it is privacy Advocates which are using it which all you privacy Advocates should be but what what do you need to like fill out that protection yeah so diversity of types of users is really important for tour uh first of all for the the Privacy security arguments you were just talking about if we had a a privacy Network that's only for cancer survivors then the fact that you've downloaded tour and you're using it tells people too much about you so we need Egyptian activists and swiss law enforcement and so on uh all blending together into the same network so that you've got your privacy uh and so that that that's a very short version of a really complicated topic where uh yes uh bad people end up using privacy on the internet also uh and we maybe should talk in a bit about uh how you handle the pr on that but I'll let you steer no absolutely I I think uh that one of the challenges is that sometimes you know bad people are early adopters of some privacy tech technology and privacy is very important important everyone to have but if uh it gets in the policy World some people point to this and say and that's why we shouldn't have privacy because bad people might use this or even point to here we we identified a bad person who has used this and so therefore this is a bad technology but yet we need this technology to have a a free and open Society so how do you how do you work on the pr with that when talking to policy makers yeah so part of the answer is you need to have a whole lot of users and you need to have a whole lot of good ordinary users and part of the challenge that we have if you're law enforcement and you hate the world and you hate the internet and you learn about this tour thing and some bad person used it you figure it's it's privacy it's stupid nobody wants it there are what six users one of them was bad uh get rid of this thing but the reality is that we have something like 8 million daily users and almost all of them are ordinary people who are trying to get to Facebook without getting spied on or they're in Iran and Iran blocked Facebook so they're trying to just get to their uh cute cat pictures or whatever people do on the internet so that ordinariness pardon mostly cats mostly cats so that ordinariness is really important for uh for tourist sustainability for the fact that we continue to exist so that's one part of it but another part of it is you need to build allies in among your adversaries you need to go find the FBI people who understand Tor and teach them why it's important and help them start using it also so I was uh telling somebody a story earlier about uh I have a friend who used to go to Defcon and shukan and so on and then he joined the FBI and he's a hacker dude who works for the FBI but he really understands Tor and he was telling me a story about being in a room with the Department of Justice uh one day many years ago now where some lawyer said you know what we should do today we should make a law outlawing tour today that that's what the US government needs and he stood up and said I work for the FBI are you trying to make my job impossible I need this tool and the fact that he was in that room that day to say that is maybe why they didn't try to work on that law that time so build allies uh among the people who start off hating or fearing your project uh is a really important piece for sustainability uh but also super challenging I just add some anecdotes to that one of the things I was doing back at the uh eff would be sometimes a exit node would get some inquiries from from law enforcement uh and uh it was very useful to have people in law enforcement who I knew um and could say look could you explain it to your colleagues what an exit note is and why this is not you know the droids you're looking for uh and it was much very handy to have someone inside the system who could explain what it was rather than someone outside trying to explain it and being the sort of person who can have a civil conversation with a cop uh doesn't come naturally to our community so this is a uh this is a skill that you have to learn to try to figure out how to communicate to them in a way that that's going to reach them so sometimes you know also had the uh accusation that this is just helping law enforcement or governments or it's it helping you know people people in power uh gain it but you you have a counter Aram as we we've discussed yeah so one of the most important topics to talk about uh in the tour World which is actually a great fit for for this week is how the power structures work so you might look at uh at the tour Network the tour use and say well this is helping good people and it's helping bad people it's a two-edged sword uh you can Define good and bad as governments or criminals or or whatever your good and bad are uh but the reality is the the people with a lot of power already the ones who have militaries and and law enforcement and so on they've got a lot of other options they're already uh they have many choices for how to stay private whereas the people who are vulnerable and don't have the power whether that's because they're uh lgbtq in Uganda uh or uh or all sorts of other examples of vulnerable populations around the world those are the people who benefit even more from Tor so uh as you're thinking through is it worthwhile to society or not you start off saying well here's an argument for here's an argument against but I think the the the important thing is uh is that it's most useful for the people who need it most and not so necessary for like if you have a military already you're you're doing fine use your intelligence agency's privacy Tool uh but if you don't have other options then tour is most useful for you right and accessible right that because people can download it just start using it and yeah and it has to stay free and freely available to everyone uh imagine you're in uh Burma and you want to have some privacy on the internet uh maybe in your cryptocurrency utopian future uh they just grab some ethereum and pay that way but they don't have resources to buy coins to spend them on this so we want to actually make sure that it's especially available actually free for the people in the world who need it the most and and I love that you do that making it free and available and you're not nonprofit and so on but there's also we we need to have tour be around forever right a sustainable model so can you talk a little bit about how tour keeps sustainable yeah so this whole how do you fund it or how do you keep it going thing is a is an important topic to talk about for all of these projects but especially like large uh networks of volunteers that hopefully have a nonprofit behind them the tour funding model uh up until recently was actually pretty similar to the professor funding model like I used to write research papers uh I would get National Science Foundation grants to understand anonymity more and we would use those to write more tour uh then we got some funding from uh the US state department and the foreign Ministry of Sweden to teach people around the world how to be safer but a lot of that it it's basically a combination in our world between the researcher Professor get grants to to to write new research and the traditional nonprofit get government funding to to continue having these tools exist and that's that's an exciting balance to have these days where uh something like half of our funding is still coming from governments and you might look at that and say well wait a minute doesn't the NSA hate this surely there's somebody in the NSA who hates it but there are also people in the NSA who use tour and rely on tour uh but our funding doesn't come from that piece I don't want to be dealing with the intelligence side of things our our funding comes from the foreign Ministry that wants to help uh other groups around the world be able to speak and read and learn freely what's going on on the internet well another source of funding right is that people donate to tour people like you could go to the tour project.org and and help help with the cause and we're actually doing a fundraising endof Year campaign right now so I don't want to turn this into a fundraising pitch but we are a nonprofit and we're in the middle of a uh I think the fund the donations uh get matched up to a pretty large amount by some very nice uh major donors excellent so one of thing also you know uh comes up a lot in in this community is uh adding an incentive layer uh and you have some some thoughts on on putting that into the tour system yeah so the tour Network right now is made from volunteers who the the fundamental building block is altruism the fundamental building block is people who have spare resources and they set up a relay they learn about somebody in Egypt or Washington DC or uh Tha who need privacy and they decide I'm I'm going to participate in that I'm going to do that and that altruism is great because the participants that we have are the right kinds of participants they're they're doing it for the right reasons on the other hand we only have something like 8,000 relays around the world and periodically we wonder how do we get like imagine if we could do some sort of incentive coin thing uh that would get more people excited so there are a couple of problems with that that uh that seem pretty hard to to balance with the altruism Community organic growth one of the big ones is uh so we start with this altruism building block imagine you instead start with the capitalism building block the goal is I'm going to maximize my my my revenue from this uh so in that case my first step would be minimizing my costs I will go to the same cheapest ISP that everybody else goes to and I'll run my relay there so that I don't have to spend any more money than I possibly have to uh but then if I'm in this in order to make money why shouldn't I sell user data on the side like the goal of capitalism is to is to maximize The Profit so the the incentive structure the reason why people are are wanting to participate is something that we need to think through really carefully and I guess the the broader topic there is when you're building uh privacy decentralized tools think through the power structures that you're trying trying to enable or disable um and I think it was actually Harry from Nim who who framed it this way originally uh many years ago uh you have to think about the power structures because if you don't think about the power structures you're going to end up accidentally reinforcing the existing power structures you're going to end up uh putting the centralization back in the people who who currently have the power without even realizing that that's what you're doing so uh all of these tools are inherently political and you have to think through uh what what impact you're having on society by the by the incentives and other structure choices that you make and some of the things about tour is it can be challenging to uh existing power structures and you know have you fac you faced some of the these challenges some countries that you might not go to uh as a result yep uh well there are it it's tough to know which countries actually care about these things um there are some countries like China that I probably shouldn't go to and it would probably be fine uh I was in Taiwan uh meeting with a bunch of people who were working against the great firewall in China and the the the party game at breakfast one day was what happen what do you think happens if Roger goes to China and the the consensus answer was 95% chance you're totally fine 5% chance you disappear and uh and it it wouldn't be because they would Target me in particular it's because Trump would arrest some Huawei VP that week and they would make a list of people they could retaliate against that nobody would really miss that much and I would be on the list we miss you a lot well yep so yeah so I probably shouldn't go to Russia I probably shouldn't go to Iran probably shouldn't go to China um but for each of these cases I'm waiting for a regime change and hopefully it won't take that long and also at the same time there are some countries that have invited you in to talk about tour to find out more about it right and from the government and from Civil Society yeah I actually got an invite from the Russian government to go to Moscow back in like 2017 and I asked my Russian friends should I do this and they said because the government itself has invited you yes it'll be safe you should do it and this is the last year you can do it my government is crumbling and uh and I didn't end up doing it for Visa reasons but uh regret absolutely um well is there anything else that we should we talk about maybe take some questions from the audience I know we're behind on time do do we have some time for questions and such I heard up all right uh so yeah is there any any questions from the audience um oh yeah one one yeah first then Harry all right all right super thank you so much uh do you feel like Tor is still heading in the right direction since like many countries actually now are Banning tour actually I'm from Syria and during the war the checkpoints used to check our laptops and they would check if you have tour downloaded and then you like screwed if you have it and also like there's a lot of rumors that FBI is like monitoring exit nodes as well and using that data and to see okay what other suspicious activities happening there so I feel like there's too much eyes on tour now that a lot of countries are Banning it exit nodes are being monitored slowly but gradually do you see this keep going forever thank you yeah so these are these are broad topics um I think tour in general is still the best solution that we have in the world for uh how to get privacy in a global way um there it is the case that uh more and more countries are turning authoritarian and trying to block and control what happens on their internet and it's not just Syria uh part of the challenge that uh that comes to that uh years ago so you probably know the story about Syria and blue coat but most people here probably don't know the story of Syria and blue coat I'll I'll I'll spare you the whole story but the summary is it's a California company that was building and operating the surveillance and censorship infrastructure in Syria so this is a it's not like Syria thought what we're going to do today is crack down on the internet they went to some sales conference where the blue coat people are like yo buy my thing you can collect all the bloggers and uh and stay a dictator so they bought it and deployed it uh and that is that that tendency of California corporations and Italian corporations and Israeli corporations of building these uh arms and selling them as many arms dealers around the world uh is a is a growing problem for everybody it's not a tour specific thing but uh but it's something that that we as free Society who care about this need to figure out how to fight back against um so you asked about uh is T heading the right direction in terms of countries trying to crack down on it uh I think we're we're doing pretty well on that uh it's certainly the case that some countries try to stop you from reaching the tour network but that Russia Iran Syria uh China uh I'm almost done with the list so it's not like half of the world is doing that um and then to very briefly try to answer your exit relay who's watching them question uh a lot of people wonder well wait a minute I heard that the tour network is mostly run by the FB the NSA or I heard or there are a bunch of rumors going around we actually know a lot of the people who run the tour relays because one of the uh Community phenomena that that has grown is there are a bunch of nonprofits around the world who Run Tour exit relays in their country there's one in the Netherlands there's one in Sweden there's a new one in Italy that's just popping up uh there's one in France there are several in the US there's one in Canada and these are nonprofits that collect donations from their local hacker group or something like that in order to run large exit relays and maintain this distributed trust property so we know a lot of the people who are running the relays and they're not the NSA that's the good news the bad news is we're a network on the internet and the internet is is more centralized than it should be and large governments have been working hard for the past 10 years to get better and better at watching the whole internet so how the the open research question for for us and you is how do we build a tool that can handle all of this centralization that's happening on the internet like there are not enough undersea cables under the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean there are enough not enough Cloud flares there are not enough aamis and Amazon and so on all of this centralization threatens like okay you want to use tour great but you're using tour to talk to cloudflare every time because cloudflare hosts 40% of the web these days so that recentralization means that if somebody's watching Cloud flare uh there's only so much we as a privacy tool can do so complicated topic I've been rambling for a while we'll hit another question ask me more afterwards so Harry from Nim uh so I remember quite a few years ago Roger I said hey we're at some tour Meetup and I said hey why doesn't t uh get some of this cryptocurrency funding and I I do hope that everyone here I US tour uh you know we Nim is incentivized tour isn't and that makes it even more important I think for people to donate to tour because it is a valuable public good the amount of sheer Capital inefficient Capital waste I see uh is and cryptocurrency is ridiculous and if 1% of that money went to tour tour would be amazing do support us but but my question is this which is while I think you have perfectly valid reasons for not doing tour the Ico it is unfortunately uh other people did it for you if I remember correctly uh aour now calling themselves anyone and then every like year or two or even every few months I see yet another uh scammy thing actually using the tour name often yep uh trying to raise money and I remember talking the aour guys I was like yo are you shipping this money to tour not really so can you explain a bit like how do you deal with this the fact that people are raising money off your good work uh trying to quote unquote incentivize tour relays but then nothing goes back to you which is crazy what what do you do in that situation I think you got a bunch of relays jumping on yeah so that that's also a Broad and complicated topic um it's definitely the case that uh folks who are passing around large large amounts of money uh and uh freeloading off of the tour ecosystem should be helping instead to sustain the tour ecosystem um one of the other topics that your question reminded me of uh is more than half of the nodes in the Bitcoin Network in the in the Bitcoin Network are available as tore onion addresses so the the the Bitcoin Network relies on the tour Network for its continued connectivity and that is an example of an infrastructure thing going back to your sustainability question that's an example of uh tour as embedded infrastructure as critical infrastructure where it's not just Bitcoin it's there a bunch of tools that are building on top of tour uh and we we need to continue existing so that all of these other projects can build on top of us uh but that you're right there's a a sustainability side of that from an openness side our code is free software open source you should use it for whatever but from a uh Community Building name recognition trademark side please don't name your thing confusingly like tour it's not going to end well nobody's going to have fun in that situation if you want your thing to be tour talk to us work with us uh make sure that you are prioritizing user safety rather than than whatever other uh capitalist style incentives you come in with u so yeah there uh uh there are a lot of things to talk about in that area let's have one more do we have a question um hey um it's Henry um so a question in a similar vein actually is if you look back to the origins of tour the original design for tour is I think nearly two decades old and at that time we didn't have the same uh technology for doing economic coordination like blockchains just didn't even exist weren't even thought of um in retrospect this is sort of a a weird counterfactual to try to ask but if you were designing tour today or if 20 years ago we had the blockchains of today that we have do think the same arguments about whether or not t should have an economic model would come to the same conclusion or do you think that there is a possibility for New Economic coordination technology to maybe alleviate some of the problems that would have prevented having a sort of economic model for routing built into a tour so the particular blockchain stuff that we have today did not exist back then that's true but there were like Mojo nation which turned into least Authority which turned into zcash there were uh related projects like that and part of the challenge that we the tour people saw in each of these uh decentralized token exchange ideas uh each of so the analysis of it how do you know if it's going to go the way you you hoped it would go um it that the analysis always ends with a sentence and then it's just like an economy which starts off great you're like wow that that'll like capture reality but that that just means that you're going to have all the terrible side effects the real economies have where people show up trying to get the money and they take advantage of whatever protocol uh uh you've built and and and uh Fork your your blockchain or whatever the metaphor is for this year uh so I think uh we did have uh those types of Tools around at the time and we explicitly tried to simplify so that we could understand where it would go and we chose to build as an organic community that focused on people trusting each other rather than as a uh as a as a mathematical mechanism that hopefully you code it exactly right and you let it go and it goes in the right direction because those sure sure don't seem like they're going to end up uh prioritizing the safety of users thanks Court thanks Roger uh Round of Applause thank you