The network is only carrying about 60% of its advertised capacity: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.png Encrypting the data seems to be the rate-limiting step. That being said, the more users there are, the more diverse they are, and the more diverse the traffic, the safer and more anonymous everyone is. Bitcoin clients only download and upload about 100 MB a day (although that depends on how many connections they maintain), so this isn't like bittorrent traffic. That's true, there's really no advantage to connecting to a hidden service as opposed to a regular bitcoin node over Tor, and the connections tend to be much spottier. You can specify however many connections you want in bitcoin.conf: maxconnections=N You can even specify the nodes you want to connect to (that's how connecting to onion addresses works, actually, you have to tell Tor to map private IP addresses to onion domains using the mapaddress feature and then tell bitcoin-qt to connect to those IP addresses). Anyway, I don't think there's a distinction between incoming and outgoing connections.