According to the recent State of the Onion, there’s around 150k snowflake bridges. I don’t know how much of the whole snowbank (snowstorm? What’s the collective term for snowflake bridges?) is used at any given time, but my bridge is usually unused.
So what if they could be used as middle nodes? Unused snowflake bridges make up a LOT of unused bandwidth that would make onionsites much faster and massively increase the number of possible circuits.
Additionally, if both the entry and middle node are snowflakes, it’d be very hard for the either to tell if they’re middle or entry nodes.
https://snowstorm.net/ is a different thing, it’s not Snowflake, but related.
I call it “Snowflake network”.
Precisely what you’re asking (Snowflake as middle relays) is not feasible because Snowflake code doesn’t use the Tor code. But the idea of utilizing NAT hole-punching for middle relays came to me as well , and I found this paper about this (namely section 2): Tor and NAT devices: increasing bridge & relay reachability. Basically the idea is (at least the way I see it): NAT traversal requires third parties, which is not good for anonymity of relay users.
But perhaps a more decentralized way of NAT traversal could be found.
research paper