I think you're confusing a relay and an exit node here. Pretty much everyone using Tor runs a node and for virtually everyone it's on IP also used for personal transactions. There are silly services which take every tor node as suspicious. They're wrong, but it doesn't matter if you get banned.

I also considered bringing up that point, but then I actually looked it up[0]:

> Tor relays are also referred to as "routers" or "nodes." They receive traffic on the Tor network and pass it along. Check out the Tor website for a more detailed explanation of how Tor works.

[0]: https://www.eff.org/torchallenge/what-is-tor.html

How does that change anything? The point is that a relay isn't an exit node, so there's no reasonable reason to block them.

You don't seem to understand what the terminology is... exit relays are relays.

> There are three kinds of relays that you can run in order to help the Tor network: middle relays, exit relays, and bridges.

There's dictionary definition and there's typical usage. When people say relay node, they typically don't mean exit nodes. Not 100% correct, but the assumption is common.

Excuse my ignorance, but why should I not be allowed to run a Tor relay (not an exit node!) at home when I have sufficient bandwidth and purchased a static IP through my IP which they advertise even "to allow running of private servers"? I thought one of the points of the article was the propagation and subsequent democratization of Tor/Onion sites? If I have to rent a VPS to run a node, isn't half the point defeated?

IMO the real issue is that my bank is reckless for picking a shitty UK service (who don't even speak our local language - just imagine some poor soul getting blocked because someone else running a Tor node over DHCP).

You're allowed, but you will be blacklisted by many services...

I also agree that it shouldn't be a problem if you're not an exit node, but that's the way it works.

The list of tor nodes is public, and many sysadmins simply import it without thinking much about it. Even though they should only ban exit nodes.

Thanks for that info, I had no idea it was that bad. It's horrible yet understandable, with so many underpaid, overworked sysadmins out there (i can count myself as one of them).