[warner25]

I think most people do feel that way about Tor, both in terms of assuming that 99% of its users are criminals and that it should be demonized. It's interesting to me because I think most of those people don't feel the same way about encryption in general, which of course enables Tor and all sorts of criminal activity in other contexts. Everyone has something to hide from someone and wants to see the green lock symbol in their browser's address bar along with other assurances of some degree of privacy. I don't know how most people decide where to draw a line.

[opportune]

There are some things that are perfectly legal for me to Google search, that I don’t want my ISP or Google to know about. So Tor works well for that. Tor would also be useful if governments were to crack down on free speech.

You can apply basically the same argument to money. If I have $20m in Bitcoin I don’t want my name to be tied to my wallet address (because a KYC exchange saw where the money went to) because it makes me a target, for example. And in the case of censorship or something I want to be able to do with the money what I please.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, in my opinion. We have to use cumbersome technology to get any modicum of true digital privacy. Just because people use it for illegal things doesn’t mean that the desire for privacy or the technology itself is bad. One day things we find morally just may be illegal too