[chatmasta]

Shameless plug, for my undergraduate senior thesis in 2014 I coauthored a paper related to this called “A TorPath to TorCoin” [0]. The main premise was proof-of-bandwidth cryptocurrency, but its resistance to Sybil attacks was partially dependent on assignment of publicly verifiable but privately addressable circuits. So the “TorPath” part was about circuit assignment, and in retrospect perhaps more interesting than the cryptocurrency aspect of it. The tl;dr is a Neff shuffle with a matrix of relays and assignment servers.

We never developed it further beyond the initial research (it was senior spring, not a lot getting done, I even forgot to buy Bitcoin). I remained (and remain) interested in decentralized VPN networks, and played around with implementing something around it, but ultimately I didn’t have the experience to build what I wanted.

Personally, I like what Orchid, Tailscale and ZeroTier are doing. I also like Fly.io and Cloudflare Workers and generally any product that iterates toward a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform. The root obstacle is incumbent compute-based clouds oversubscribing compute by gouging on bandwidth. This makes the cloud environment inhospitable for any cost-effective, transit-intensive business like a CDN/VPN, increasing the barrier to entry by requiring self-hosting a distributed network.

[0] https://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/papers/hotpets14-torpath.p...