A Fair and Anonymous Payment System for the Onion Relays

Tor, aka ‘The Onion Router’, is a protocol that allows anonymous browsing of the web in the sense that the network address of the client is not known to a single relay or even relays provided by the same provider. The relay that knows the target does not know the source and vice versa. However, the current Tor relays are voluntary and unpaid, doing a social service to protect the identities of people who want to stay anonymous while browsing the web. We propose a modification of the Tor protocol so that the client can anonymously pay the Tor relays for their services through a smart-contract enabled cryptocurrency. Our design ensures that the Tor relays cannot be paid unless the client gets the data and that the client cannot get the data without paying the Tor relays.