I will presage the expected warnings before posting my question: I fully understand the security risks involved using single hops, however, with regards to my goals I have zero need for anonymity.

I am interested in archiving the contents of several Tor hidden services e.g. discussion forums, and am not intending on doing anything illegal. As a consequence, my interest is having a high bandwidth connection to these websites, with no need to remain anonymous.

I understand that one may re-compile Tor to create single hop circuits e.g. How to decrease number of Tor hops?

I also understand that while one may wish to construct a single hop circuit, very few relays have the single hop exit option enabled.

My questions are two-fold.

1. Can Tor hidden services detect that a client is using just a single hop, and reject the connection? I been advised by someone that this does occur, but I am unable to find anything that indicates that this indeed the case.

2. is the below configuration possible?

• Re-compile Tor to allow for single hops.
• Using a second instance of Tor, create a relay allowing single hop exits.
• Configure the re-compiled Tor to use this exit relay