Thanks, that’s a fair point, and you’re right that OHTTP is not a replacement for Tor.
OHTTP splits what any single party can see: the relay sees your IP but not your requests, and our gateway sees the requests but never your IP. The guarantee holds as long as the relay and the gateway don’t collude, and, as you say, a legal order served on both could break that. We don’t claim otherwise.
What it changes is the default. Until now, a wallet talked directly to a lightwalletd server that saw both your IP and every request. With OHTTP, no single operator, including us, gets both by default, for every user, with no extra setup.
Tor is still fully supported in Zodl, and you can keep using it. You don’t have to choose between the two either: with Tor enabled, the OHTTP requests themselves go over Tor, so the relay only sees a Tor exit and never your IP. That’s the combination we recommend for anyone whose threat model includes legal pressure on infrastructure providers.
To limit what the relay can infer from traffic, sensitive responses (transactions, tree states, block ranges) are padded to fixed-size chunks, so their size doesn’t reveal what was fetched.