>>23371
>Tor is pretty useless.
Your argument about BGP and timing attacks, though valid, lacks relevance. You're assuming that there are entities that control enough tor nodes to conduct timing attacks, but overlooking that this doesn't matter.
There are only a handfull of Tier 1 providers who control the entirety of the backbone of the internet. Every Tier 1 is tied into the Five Eyes+, and it is almost certain that the same is true for the Regional Tier 1's. The Tier 2's are probably all integrated, too; but even if it is only most of them, this too is irrelevant. The switches that manage the backbone and internet exchange points are made by a few manufacturers, maybe twelve to fifteen.
These companies, such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Brocade, ZTE, Nokia, and Huawei to name a few, all have key relationships with governments and intellegence agencies around the world. They are integral parts of the government-industrial complex. Tracing packets would be a novice function to perform...
Intellegence agenices monitoring tor nodes is irrelevant when they can literally monitor the entirety of the internet worldwide. The rub though is that tor must appear to be secure, at least from the point of view of normal people and from the majority of world governments. Tor is used by the intellegence comminity, too. It is both a secure way to exchange data and a way to monitor who is trading data with who. And while I believe the end-to-end encrytpgion is strong and hasn't been broken yet; but the raw traffic is being stored; and when quantum computing becomes capable, the encryption will be broken and stored data will be dissected.
To that end, your drug deals, illicit conversations and trading of, um, whatever it is you're illicitly trading, etc. is not really of interest. I assume everything is logged; but they're only going to action things that have world dominance and world power related significance.
Tor is not useless, though. It does what it was designed to do.