They need a lot of help with a lot of stuff. It would be great if improving the hidden service protocol was a top priority. Tor started out as an anonymity network, but their focus has turned into censorship circumvention, because it happens to be a side effect of using an anonymity network -- although the same thing can be accomplished with one-hop proxies. That's why bridges and obfsproxy protocols were added to the network. The Tor Project works on specific projects that sponsors pay them to work on, and for the most part those sponsors are western government agencies and NGOs that want to help activists in repressed countries. So unless someone with deep pockets comes along and asks for specific deliverables related to hidden services, I don't expect to see much improvement there. I use that for all of my hidden services. More importantly, not all users are able to route. Some are behind unconfigurable NAT. Some have crappy connections. Some can only connect for short periods of time. I2P encourages you to stay connected, because it can take 15 minutes to establish a useful number of connections to the rest of the network. If you can only connect for an hour a day, you waste a lot of time just integrating yourself into the network. Apparently, Freenet is even worse on that point. Relaying from home is free, whereas the Tor network relies on volunteers spending a lot of money to run high bandwidth relays to handle all of the users. Still, there seems to be sufficient interest that this hasn't harmed Tor yet. Also, if you want to allow access to clearnet sites, you should not allow arbitrary newbs to be exit nodes. Some people will unwittingly get in a lot of trouble and that will drive everyone away from the network. I think it's a combination of the network requirements and the lack of clearnet access that makes I2P users a very selective group. No offense to them, I think they are great people, but they are very homogenous. Almost all of them know how to code. Almost all of them are professional technologists or very tech savvy hobbyists. That works well for them now, because there isn't a lot of controversial content on the network. There are no major drug or CP sites. But if I2P was invaded by those groups, that situation would change. Not only might technical weaknesses be revealed by serious adversaries, but it would become obvious that they lack the cover you get from mixing with very diverse crowds. If there was a major CP invasion, then everyone using I2P would be a suspect, whereas I'm quite comfortable using Tor even if someone sees me using it, because of the plausible deniability of the very diverse crowd. So for these many reasons, I don't think people should be required to relay, and the size and diversity of the user base should be maximized. I was using that as an example of a monopoly and the pressures that come with it. The same logic applies to Facebook, for example. Everyone hates it but no one seems to be able to quit, even though open source, federate social networks exist (which you can run as hidden services or eepsites, even). Well, if you believe the network is going to be crippled by mass arrests, that's a good reason to start designing a robust alternative. I still wonder if adding features like layered, permanent entry guards is not worth doing in the short term. One thing I've thought about, especially since I've been hanging out with the I2P folks lately, is a trans-proxy. Similar to the onion.to and i2p.us in-proxies, or exit nodes and I2P out-proxies, but trans-proxies would proxy connections between anonymity networks. For example, to access eepsite whatever.i2p from Tor, you would go to whatever.i2p.transproxy.onion, and to access hidden service whatever.onion, you would go to whatever.onion.transproxy.i2p. You could chain these things together, so if you want to use an exit node from I2P, a modified dot exit URL like www.google.com.RelayName.exit.transproxy.i2p would get you there. Ok, that's a bit confusing for newbs, but you could access and enjoy the properties of different networks at the same time. Somehow, Freenet could be integrated into this too, so you can the plausible deniability of accessing files from Freenet, but through a hidden service, and thus a Tor connection that doesn't expose you as a Freenet user. This might even be an easier way to get the mixed properties of your theoretical network.