Yep. Decentralization entails degraded service, almost as a thermodynamic principle. It's the "eating your vegetables" of technology; even if you think people should, you can guess how many actually do.
Why do you believe decentralization is responsible for TOR’s speed? Decentralization often improves speed by routing around traffic, and the regular non-TOR internet is decentralized. BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet due to its additional decentralization of the data. I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes.
All this stuff is on the Internet, so the Internet's decentralization is a floor that we can build further decentralization on top of.
But wouldn't a hypothetical direct data link to somewhere be faster than using the Internet to get there?
It'd be more brittle, yes. It can go down with little fault tolerance; it can't serve someone else; it can be trivially MITM'd. These are the downsides of centralization and the upsides of decentralization.
> BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet
I torrent a lot, and one thing that doesn't come to mind is "fast".
You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent...
> I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes.
Like with torrenting or Bitcoin or PeerTube or whatever, you've listed a bunch of extra complexity that's all corollary to the thing being decentralized and necessarily making it slower. :p
A lot more has to happen to solve a harder coordination problem. You end up using random, non-industrial grade relays. It's more complex, and it's going to be slower.
What does that buy you though? Resilience, like if a relay goes down. Flexibility, like if you wanna use a different relay to circumvent a geolock. Privacy, in that it's much harder for an adversary to monitor you. There's no free lunch for those things, though, tragically, and they're secondary/tertiary on many people's priority list.
> You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent...
Depends on the torrent. Any popular "Linux ISO" can easily saturate my 1400mbps download speed so I download the UHD bluray remux whenever it's available. Videos encoded at 100mbps look at a lot better on a high dpi display compared to Netflix's 10mbps "4K" and also doesn't limit you to clients that support DRM.
The UX isn't great, but if you select the "Download in sequential order" option you can start watching a torrent in 5 seconds while it downloads in the background
Bittorrent is fast because it can saturate your connection by downloading chunks from multiple connections the same way things like “axel” (wget alternative) and Download Accelerator apps accomplish it over http.
There isn’t an interesting statement on Bittorrent vs internet here. Browsers just don’t make this optimization themselves, probably because most files are small, but also out of respect for the single origin server.
But TOR isn’t really any more decentralized than the internet; and it might even be less decentralized due to exit node contention. Decentralization does not seem to have anything to do with TOR’s relatively slow speed, nor does decentralization seem to have any “thermodynamic principle” of slowing things down, right? The extra complexity of TOR is precisely the thing slowing it down, by design. (Well one of the things, scarce bandwidth is another - there have always been calls & pleas for more participation in order to increase the network’s bandwidth & capacity.)
We can’t exactly compare Netflix to an unnamed slow torrent of your choice in any fair or reasonable way given that Netflix is something like 15% of all internet traffic and is heavily optimized. The fair comparison is using BitTorrent to download a file compared to a direct http or ftp download from the original source/host - and for that BitTorrent usually wins handily in my experience. Plus I’ve definitely seen some popular torrents download much faster than anything Netflix has ever served me, in terms of bytes per second.
Not decentralization, but anonymous decentralization that involves indirect routing. Decentralization can actually offset that anonymity tax somewhat by the fact that you might have multiple sources that you can request data from in parallel.
Ironically, once I cut all vegetable and, in fact, all plant-based calories, out of my diet, I experience dramatic health and fitness benefits. I expect in this case the conventional wisdom is also exactly backwards and in fact transparency is more important than privacy.
