[mike-cardwell]

No, you do not get any such thing.

Basically, the client and the machine hosting the hidden service both connect to a rendevouz point and communicate via that. The connections to the rendevouz point are not direct. They are bounced through three nodes, with three layers of encryption, each node being able to peal off one layer before passing it on to the next.

This is why hidden services are pretty slow. Every packet has to be routed through 6 other machines, which each can be anywhere in the World.

[visarga]

It's bearable. I avoided Tor for years thinking it would be too slow. My mistake. You can even watch YouTube on it.

[mike-cardwell]

There is enough bandwidth. It is latency that is the problem. That's why stuff like streaming videos or downloading large files over hidden services works fine.

[lsakdfjow]

What must be done, and by who, to solve the latency issue? Can it be improved at all? It seems that more folks rnning relays and contributing bandwidth increases available bandwidth, but what can be done about latency, anything at all?

[mike-cardwell]

Somebody put it well on the tor-talk mailing list today:

"both the client and the hidden service establish a three hop circuit to the same tor relay, where the connections are joint, so hidden services will have even double the delay of normal tor traffic. If relays were homogeneous distributed among the globe, two random relays will be 1/4 earth circumference apart on average. This means that a round trip will have a speed of light delay of 12 hops * 10 000km each / 300 000 km/s speed of light. That's 400ms from finite speed of light. Switches, routers and relays along the way will add to that."