Most of us did stuff like this when we were younger.

For starters, we were broke. I mean, we didn’t have enough extra cash to pay for something we knew we could probably get for free. Back then, having a credit card in college was basically a “rich kid” thing. The money we had was whatever was in our pockets, maybe stashed under a pillow, or saved in a piggy bank. These days, kids are more “modern,” so the idea of not having a card paid for by mom or dad, or at least some extra cash, sounds ridiculous. But that’s how it was for a lot of us.

So I’d constantly look for ways around paying, because I genuinely couldn’t afford it. Think learning C just to write a keygen.exe and bypass license checks, doing in-memory hex edits to tweak games and give myself more virtual coins, or forking Tor to get single-hop proxy connections.

Good ol’times.

I'm in Europe so I don't get less than 20Mbit/s on any circuit but I asume he could have got the same speed by just selecting a few local, fast nodes as bridge.

And could it possibly be that people exist that do things for pure enjoyment of the exercise? Looks like they learned quite a bit throughout the process. In practical terms, this may even land them a job at Tor (or elsewhere) later, since they can demonstrate that they understood what it is doing and where to find the relevant pieces of information to "circumvent" the protection.