So, I don't know your mother, and can't say what kind of extreme technical needs she might have as part of her lifestyle or job; but, I guess I will presume you asked this question from the depressingly stereotypical perspective of "assuming peoples' mothers are not very technically skilled as they are older women, how would a mother use it" and answer your question anyway :(.

So, she might not use the first version, and if she does it might be installed or otherwise set up by you (so this hinges a lot on how much she trusts you ;P) or another friend of hers. However, we are building a simple user interface to make the experience of using it friendly and pleasant, and I guess it is worth adding that we also chose a name that we hope does not turn non-technical users away ;P.

So the reasons she might use it are:

* you install it on her computer

* it has a simple user interface

* it has a non-technical sounding name

Is that correct?

What if you reinterpret "my mother" to be "average internet user, in a country with average internet freedoms, who doesn't read HN etc"?

You could make that same argument about VPNs in general, which happens to be a 25-30 billion dollar industry. While I may or may not have reasons why a random "average" person might use this service, I find the question confusing... is the product not capable of being a success if people exist who don't want to use the service?

This kind of question always comes up for just about every service ever developed, and as the discussion continues the goalposts tend to shift and the user gets less and less sophisticated and more and more stubborn until at some point you demonstrate a user exists for which I can't prove they want it, and then victory is somehow declared. It is a sport I don't see much interest in playing.

To flip the question: we are providing a replacement for a service that already exists which is used by people worldwide and makes up a sizable market; our replacement is more secure and likely to cost less. Given that beachhead, you can now ask "who else would want to use this service if only it were cheaper and more secure?", and have a really fun brainstorming session.

If the answer is "the same reasons someone might use a VPN or Tor" that's fair enough, and a much better answer than "you install it on her computer".

(Though there are a variety of use-cases for VPNs and I doubt Orchid addresses most of that $25-30B market)

I'll bite: such users are more likely to want to run an Orchid relay or exit node, with default settings, than actually use Orchid to access the Internet (source node).

Internet users who may be less technical and may not care about surveillance or Internet freedom would still be interested when they hear "hey if you install this app you get a few $ (worth of tokens) per month just for sharing your bandwidth"

Ok, so we have two groups of people who could do it

People who are concerned about surveillance or internet freedom. The latter includes people who are in a country that is censoring the internet.

People who want to earn a little money.

That's good. The more different types of people who are motivated to adopt something, the more widely it will be adopted.