Below is a quick comparison of the Tor network and soon to be released Substratum network and why you may want to consider trying both.

The Tor Project

The Tor project began as a research project for the United States Navy to provide a way to anonymously communicate, however in 2002 the development went public and the Tor project as we know it today was born. It uses what is known as Onion routing to transfer information between two points. Typically a request is sent over 3 hops and at each hop a layer of the encryption is pealed off to see where the data needs to go next. This allows you to remain anonymous to everyone you communicate with.

PROS

• Proven security with an active community
• Very easy to setup
• Large amount of content
  • Facebook, DuckDuckGo and even The New York Times host onion sites.
• Very easy to configure and circumvent censorship.

CONS

• Very slow
  • Never expect more than 2-3 Mbps down and 1Mbps going up.
• High Latency
• Some sites are actively blocking Tor users.
• Improper use can expose your real IP.
• Onion sites are nearly impossible to remember.
  • The New York Times for example is: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/

Substratum

"Earn cryptocurrency. Change the world." Thats the headline of the Substratum project that started in February of 2017. It has not yet been released to the general public for use but working demos have been shown. The idea is you will host a node on your computer when accessing the network and anytime anyone uses your node you will be rewarded with the SUB coin. To be upfront it appears to function almost like the Tor Project however thats not really a bad thing as ill go over in the pros and cons.

PROS

• You will get paid to surf the internet and help others access restricted content at the same time.
• Being paid will motivate more users which should mean greater speeds.
• Your traffic will appear as though you are using a regular ISP.
  • This means sites blocked on Tor or even Netflix etc should be useable.
• For some use cases this could replace the need for a VPN.
• The setup appears very simple.

CONS

• This is still untested.
  • If you seriously need your privacy wait awhile while experts check for flaws.
• latency will still be issue.
• Lack of network content compared to Onion sites.

Conclusion

Considering the project goes as planned I could one day see Substratum replacing the Tor network but in order to do this it will need to gain a lot of trust and content from a community that is very suspicious of newcomers. In the meantime Tor meets the needs of the privacy conscious just a little slower than we would like.