That's why I say "(mostly) definitive" in my text - my feeling is that a locally-held copy of the consensus to be queried is going to be on average of far higher quality, completeness, and non-stagnancy than something that one tries to scrape out of Onionoo every 15 minutes.
True "definitiveness" can wait. A solution which does not require treading beyond the local area network for a "good enough" result, is a sufficient 90+% solution :-)
So let's not do that, then.
Yes.
I can see how you would think that, and I would kind-of agree, but at least this would be local and cheap. Perhaps instead of a magic protocol, it should be a REST API that's embedded in the local Tor daemon? That would be a really, REALLY common pattern for an enterprise to query.
How about that?
- alec