The Tor Project is switching to Rust

Hmmmm.

My biggest gripe with the Tor project is that it is so slow.

I don't think merely moving to Rust makes Tor faster either. And I am also not entirely convinced that Rust is really better than C.

I had that problem too, very slow on network requests, just change the setting "num_relays_proxied" from 3 to 1 to make it blazingly fast.

Then the single relay knows both who you are (your IP) and where you are going. This offers no anonymity against the relay itself.

3 relays is the goldilocks number for speed vs privacy. Using less is not a tradeoff the usual user of Tor should make.

How is 3 so much better than 2, but 4 not so much better than 3?

1 = no privacy from relay

2 = risk of collusion between relays

3 = goldilocks default

4 = ... actually, you have more attack surface and you are more susceptible to fingerprinting because everybody else is using 3, so you're timings etc help identify you

So the default is 3 and nobody ought change it! Use 3 like everybody else.

The exception is .onion sites. TOR actually deliberately defaults to 6 hops when accessing .oninon sites - 3 to protect you and 3 to project the site.