I love the idea of integrating payments to incentivize operators, but unfortunately that also incentives Sybil attacks even more -- now they can collect data AND earn fees for doing so! More useful would be something like what Nym is doing where there is a staking system for operators that requires them to put up capital (and expose that capital to slashing or similar penalty mechanisms) in order to earn fees.

The speed problems with Tor are due to the architecture that provides so much privacy, and while they can continue to slowly improve over time, Tor will never be able to match "normal" latency or speed as you're necessarily adding 3+ hops into every connection, and then limiting by (at best) the worst hops bandwidth.