3 ms·

Pardon my naivete concerning I2P. Every node is a "router" right and therefore any node can be part of any "tunnel", correct? Does anything incentivize them to

• synctext 10y ago
  Yes, you asked the cardinal question. Tor and I2P critically rely on donations. Incentive design has been an unsolved problem for decades. Bittorrent advanced the field with a very simple and effective T4T. There is a famous blogpost from 2014 giving the state-of-the-art in privacy-enhancing technology incentives: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-braids-lira-tears-and-torcoin https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-rou... I'm leading a research group at a university who has worked on this since 2007, see our initial collaborative work with Harvard University "Bandwidth as a Currency": https://www.google.com/webhp?q=bandwidth+as+a+currency https://www.google.com/webhp?q=bandwidth+as+a+currency We need "privacy credits/coins" if we want Tor/I2P/Tribler to scale to numerous millions of users.
• robert_foss 10y ago
  The incentive works in a kind of round about way, where the more nodes you talk to the more nodes you know and therefore the more fast/high capacity you know and can choose from. So sharing more bandwidth leads to you knowing more nodes, which means you'll have better tunnels. So there is an incentive for you to share more.