Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

2) The network is not a centralized service. Assuming I understand your question (and I probably do not), one may as well ask where the privacy policy is for Bitcoin. When the network launches, there will be nodes run by us, and one could believe they are logging in a way that is different from other nodes. This is something that we are sensitive to, and, if there are any such modifications (and it is not clear that there will be), they will all be available and visible to the public (as even required by our choice of open source license!). Of course, I can make no such claim for nodes run by other people or companies, but that is always the case and we fall back to the underlying security properties of the network.

3) AGPL3

4) This is still being worked on, partially because I think it is incredibly important that we make it extremely clear to anyone who does give us copyright assignment that the code they give us won't one day be forked by some future version of the entity that owns the code to build a closed-source project, and getting that right in a way that it can't ever be changed is legal time we haven't finished allocating.

5) Yes! As one high-level and in my mind very interesting example, Tor actually is a centralized service where nine directory servers are able to decide the state of the network; we are accepting nothing less than a fully-decentralized system.

6) I do not have a particularly precise answer to that question, but the answer I believe in is "not long at all", particularly given that users pay for the bandwidth they are using from other people. Under one argument, we would be self-sufficient instantaneously because any bandwidth being routed through a server we set up to help bootstrap the network would be paid for by a user.

7&8) This is a question that would lead to a very detailed answer, and so I hope I can refer you to our in-progress whitepaper. If you have any further questions, I would be happy to try to get them answered ;P.

9) It is my personal opinion that, as bandwidth is a "wasting good", that it will be extremely cheap to purchase bandwidth. I will refer you to section 7.2 of the whitepaper, "How Much Will a Packet Cost?".

Financial incentive for running relays.

When I say whitelist, I do assume prefixes in the DHT (or whatever design they're using) can be used, as otherwise the whitelist may also grow too big to be practical. If however it will gain the concept of domains or such (which is also kinda a prefix), a whitelist will also be more practical.

Tor exit nodes are not operated by many in various places where they would/could because of concerns of the exit node addresses being enough to legally ruin operators' lives, even though technically it's a pure transit. Nobody sues the county because someone committed vehicular manslaughter on their public road. But because laws are skewed against the Internet right now, all someone needs is an exit node IP to make you regret.

If, and there's little to analyze/go by right now public, nodes and everyone is totally oblivious to what packets are transmitted; and if also the packets stored on nodes' disks are encrypted/sealed, then one could assume a filterless system to be practical.

This is all speculation, based on the little info there is. I really hope the team has come up with better designs that obliviate the concerns surrounding Tor, and ideally also not suffer from Freenet like slowness.

EDIT: Of course, once you have a filter, you will need to deal with the responsibility like Youtube does. If you do not know what's on disk or passing through, which is the ideal technically, then it would be best for the Internet and free communication. So, I'm not sure if a filter is a good idea, if that means you get subpoena'd and held liable for enabling one too many whitelist subscriptions.