Quote from: Mike Hearn on June 02, 2014, 05:23:24 AM

Another is that Tor is more centralised than the certificate authorities are: there are only seven directory authorities, and Tor is largely funded by the US government. There are about 100 independent CAs spread around the world and they're funded by their users.

CA's are "funded by their users"? How so? If you want to find out more about how CA's work I recommend this page: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/certificate-authority-2012-02-25-en . Starting a discussion on that basis is difficult.

Tor is more "centralized" than CA's? The claim that Tor is "funded" by the US government is pretty far out there - I would like to see more detailed evidence for such claims. Here is a list of sponsors: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

The TOR protocol was basically invented by David Chaum in 1981, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network. It's the same guy who laid for the foundation for Bitcoin in the 80's. Clearly the idea of a mixing network is the exact opposite of attaching identities to nodes. In the link I posted above he argued recently that all routers could/should be TOR nodes. The whole point of mixing is to detach identity from actors. The whole point of CA's is the opposite.