The first thing that entered my mind was that Tor is becoming more detectable and blockable. And that various states, China certainly, may be blocking Tor with increasing effectiveness. Back in 2012, a research paper disclosed the sophisticated methods that China leverages to detect and block Tor. With deep packet inspection as a component of digital surveillance, Tor may be facing difficult times.
The lefts (which many computer savy people are) commitment to privacy is deteriorating.
Lawyers get more and more aggressive because of piracy. Now that the music streaming and tv show streaming industries are maturing they have more resources for that.
The bot waves get worse and worse. You can see them ending up on Twitter and Instagram and phishing mails... before they end up there, their traffic gets routed through SOMETHING. Bet your ass it's a lot of load damaging Tor
I've started to learn about this node thing. So far I know that it is the nodes that ultimately decide what Bitcoin's rules are and will be. So I assume that this is why it's a very serious situation to look into these charts.
Lots of Bitcoin nodes are on the same infra as Lightning nodes. Lots of LN nodes went hybrid using vps, ditching tor as it was unreliable. What time period are the drops shown in the screenshot corresponding to?
Shouldn't nodes increase as fees go down on base layer? Also I've heard some things about Tor not being completely private with nodes being visible an law enforcement access.
Footnotes