16 ms·

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

378 points by apsec112 9y ago

anotheryou 9y ago
buzzwords I see. what does it do?
- jv22222 9y ago
  From the FAQ: The Orchid protocol uses an overlay network built upon the existing Internet, which is driven by a peer-to-peer tokenized bandwidth exchange. The orchid protocol is an open-source overlay network that runs on top of the Internet. Its fully decentralized, because rather than traffic being routed through central authorities—your ISP or your VPN—it’s instead routed randomly through a network of bandwidth contributors who sign up to share their surplus bandwidth and activate their Internet-connected device as a “node.” Users that want to access an uncensored Internet (bandwidth consumers) pay the bandwidth contributors in Orchid tokens through a peer-to-peer exchange. Because neither the traffic nor the payments can be monitored by central authorities, both contributors and consumers of bandwidth enjoy a fully anonymous, surveillance-free experience. Also of note: Who are the founders? Stephen Bell: Steve started companies in Europe, the U.S., and China before founding Trilogy VC China, where he spent 10 years backing Chinese seed stage startups. Brian J. Fox: Brian is an entrepreneur and open-source advocate, the first employee of the Free Software Foundation, and the author of the GNU Bash shell. Jay Freeman: Jay is a software engineer and the developer of the Cydia software distribution platform used on millions of jailbroken iOS devices. Gustav Simonsson: Gustav is an engineer and developer who helped launch Ethereum in 2015, working with core protocols, clients, and security auditing. Dr. Steven Waterhouse: Steven is an experienced investor and entrepreneur, having co-founded RPX Corp, led cryptocurrency projects at Fortress and Pantera Capital, and the Honeycomb product at Sun Microsystems. [Edit] I _think_ they are trying to create something like Etherium but for decentralized internet.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Like Tor, but with capitalism. Financial incentive for running relays.
  - kunimu 9y ago
    It's worth noting that a financial incentive does not necessarily equal capitalism; if one were employing wage labour then it would constitute a capitalist system, as the M-C-M' circuit would be fulfilled.
qeternity 9y ago
They call it a protocol but this is very much a startup/ICO, having raised nearly $5m in seed. Not that there is anything wrong with this, it seems like a very cool project. But it does seem to be very intentionally presenting itself as something that is closer to a not-for-profit a la Tor.
- saurik 9y ago
  It is maybe worth noting that we had actually looked into whether we could be registered as a non-profit and still raise money by these means to build out our implementation and market it to the world, and that was simply not possible :/. We are, however, all deeply committed to open source, and are working on how to best ensure that this is enforced in the company's charter (such that even if there are any future changes, there will never be any fear). All of our work is to be released under the AGPL3; and, while we have filed for a patent, we will be licensing the patent to the world in a manner similar to how Mozilla manages their patent portfolio. Brian Fox, who is in charge of making sure we have a successful and inclusive open source project, was the original developer of the bash shell, was for a while the maintainer of GNU emacs, and was the first employee of the Free Software Foundation (as Richard Stallman was a volunteer), and so is keenly aware of how important it is for technology to be available to everyone.
  - awakeasleep 9y ago
    This is.. very exciting & excellent :)
saurik 9y ago
Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working on this project in charge of our smart contracts and payment logic. He was one of the core developers who worked on Ethereum, specifically focussing on blockchain security.
- someguydave 9y ago
  How do you solve the problem of penetrating NATs and firewalls without relying on a central coordination server?
  - saurik 9y ago
    If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be STUN or if we need to integrate it into the security model), so all you will need is the address and public key of another node (which you will need anyway in order to connect to the network).
    - someguydave 9y ago
      >so all you will need is the address and public key of another node (which you will need anyway in order to connect to the network). But this begs the question. How does the user get the public key and address of a node without connecting to a public directory? How does he know he's connecting to something trustworthy?
      - saurik 9y ago
xwvvvvwx 9y ago
This is a funded startup. How do they intend to make money?
- kirillseva 9y ago
  ICO
  - saurik 9y ago
    Not exactly, though I can appreciate why it might seem like that at first glance; we are selling a "utility token". This distinction is interesting and important as we are not selling a token to raise money to do development, instead having taken on seed investors to help us get the right team of developers and advisors to do this initial build out. The sale of tokens will be made after we have this network fully working and launched, meaning that we are really targeting a group of people you might call "customers" who will buy bandwidth tokens (as opposed to "investors", which is the target market of an ICO).
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      “This distinction is interesting and important...” ...and will be at the eventual inquest I’m sure. https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Sustainability isn't even the greatest concern: where there are customers (people who pay for access to the network) there is a database of customers (in order to allow authentication) that has to be kept out of the grasp of government agencies.
  - saurik 9y ago
    Actually, that's the great part about what we are doing: it is all built on Ethereum, so there is no centralized database, and the users are generally pseudonymous! OK, you might then say "isn't that just a decentralized database?", but in addition to a form of "probabilistic micropayments" that ends up shrouding most of the participants, we are also working on integrating other techniques to make the payments fully anonymous (and have brought on a team of advisors which includes a professor of cryptography who specializes in this area).
woodandsteel 9y ago
The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content. You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.
  - saurik 9y ago
    FWIW, if you look at Tor, Facebook now runs a hidden service that allows people to access Facebook's website. This is essentially the same thing as someone having provided a number of exit nodes that will only route to Facebook. The problem, though, is that this requires the client and maybe even the website to be modified to use the .onion URLs for all accesses back to the site (at least, any absolute URL on the site back to the site will cause a problem). I will personally contend that it is worth it to allow Facebook to do this, or to allow anyone to do this for any website, in order to get more people using the network for everything, as the more users you can get using the service to do normal traffic the more easily you can hide everyone. This is particularly noticeable given that in some countries, such as the United States where I live, simply accessing the Tor website to download Tor will end up flagging you for further monitoring. If Tor had only as many users and exit nodes as it does right now, but additionally had, for example, a billion people in China accessing Wikipedia through exit nodes that refused to go anywhere but Wikipedia, that makes a world of difference. As it stands, people are actually actively discouraged and even shamed for using Tor to access random websites or ones that use a lot of bandwidth, as that means that they are using (or even "abusing") a limited amount of donated bandwidth that somehow needs to be reserved for those who "really need it" (and thereby, will be targeted just for that). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...
zzalpha 9y ago
How is this different from Freenet or Tor?
- saurik 9y ago
  (edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".) Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technology, you might look at Tor, or the "out-proxies" from I2P).
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    So what are the benefits over Tor?
    - HelloNurse 9y ago
      It seems intended to be more anonymous and decentralized than Tor, and safer thanks to the strength of numbers, but their whitepaper is diseharteningly incomplete and disingenuous, particularly about problems that are shared with Tor. For example: "The distribution of Entry Nodes is a difficult topic. If oppressive governments are able to access this list, they will block user’s abilities to access the list." Or simply, you know, go after whoever runs entry nodes. Or run their own entry nodes and, even if they can't compromise the network, trace the evil cypherpunks who want to use encryption. Unfortunately, some practical and political problems cannot be solved with improved cryptography.
      - g_simonsson 9y ago
        Certainly incomplete as it is still a draft, though I'd contest "dishearteningly". Also, why do you find it disingenuous? We're not shying away from what entry nodes and bootstrap of user clients is one of the hardest problems to solve.
    - 9y ago
natch 9y ago
Very interesting. Visited Noisebridge a while back and there was a post on the door telling visitors what to do when the FBI visits to ask about the TOR exit node. I wonder how this tool avoids the exit node problem. Also, from the FAQ: >Can't NSA just hack into this too? >No. Because of its fully decentralized approach, distributed architecture, and the size of the global network, Orchid cannot be easily hacked by any single government or entity. That's not really a satisfactory answer. First, it doesn't answer the question. The question was not "can NSA easily hack into this." And I don't think the NSA is necessarily deterred by something being not easy. The bar needs to be higher than not easy, even if "not easy" is a polite understatement. Also relying on the size of the network means there is a bootstrapping problem, right? Hopefully they will get there. This doesn't mean the system is bad... I'm just saying the FAQ answer is bad. On the positive side, given the cred of some of the people involved (saurik!) I am optimistic this may well have a shot at working.
- saurik 9y ago
  Ugh. FWIW: we agree. That FAQ answer was rewritten, and it failed to go on the website. Here is the updated text that was written a couple nights ago by one of the people who helped design the protocol with me after being confused by the answer on the website. > Yes. Our initial release targets China as the adversary, which is a more tractable problem. We may implment full Chaumian mixes in the future (which are immune to metadata/traffic analysis), but they are unlikely to be complete for our first public release.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Would you consider changing "China" to something like "Chinese government"? Or, if I'm understanding it correctly, maybe something like "Our initial release operates with a threat model of an authoritarian government's internet censorship, such as those seen in China, Turkey, or Russia."
    - saurik 9y ago
      I agree with this edit and have made a similar change, pushed it to our server, and are poking others for review. Thank you for your feedback: that is a much clearer answer (as otherwise it sounds like China is hacking into places as opposed to "we mean their firewall").
dharma1 9y ago
the project seems very cool. related: https://medium.com/@stevewaterhouse/how-token-sales-can-be-an-instrument-for-social-change-91b6d01792d0 https://medium.com/@stevewaterhouse/how-token-sales-can-be-a...
jampekka 9y ago
So the business plan is to become the oligarchs of the new network?
- g_simonsson 9y ago
  Hopefully not! Ideally token allocations are fair and do not skew ownership towards any individual or entity while still providing good incentives (we're still working on figuring out what good allocations look like)
  - jampekka 9y ago
    Are there any public details on the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens? Sorry for nagging, but I'm one of those skeptical of greedy people acting maximally greedy saving the world as a process waste. Edit: typo
    - g_simonsson 9y ago
      The main reason there's currently not more details around the SAFT and the token model/allocations is that it would distract from the overall project and tech, given the current hype of blockchains and tokens. There's certainly economic incentives for all participants, and what I find interesting is that since we're open sourcing all the code, anyone can easily deploy another network with a different token (model). This puts pressure on us to propose fair token model/allocations else we risk disruption by forks or simply new Orchid networks.
halite 9y ago
When are they doing ICO!?
diaperIITB 9y ago
How is the route decided? If it uses a centralized server for that, then wouldn't it be easy to block that.
- saurik 9y ago
  We definitely do not have any centralized servers. The currently-specified mechanism to determine routes is that they are decided by connecting to a distributed peer-to-peer network that is modeled in many ways after a distributed hash table, at which point you do lookups of random keys in the hash space, which results in a randomized scalable lookup. There are mechanisms in play (and which I assume are already described in our in-progress whitepaper) to protect against eclipse attacks, sybil attacks, and some other miscellaneous attacks on the routing infrastructure. That said, this is also some ongoing work, and we are actively engaging with and being reviewed by people both in academia and in the field with respect to our techniques.
tbodt 9y ago
As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.
- kovek 9y ago
  Why? Do you understand Ethereum? I'd like to understand it better
  - herbst 9y ago
    At this point it is either a magic buzzword to get investors throwing money at you or actually a smart thought of putting cryptographical proof into something. Usually its the first tho.
- macawfish 9y ago
  Call me zealous, but I'm the same way. I'm wary of the potential for monetary incentives to skew actual demand. I've seen how digital advertising has more or less destroyed much of the internet. Hopefully decentralization will prevent monopolies or oligopolies from forming, but I'm not so sure about that. At this point, it's hard to say what actual distributions of wealth might look like if people start using cryptocurrencies in their daily lives, for example to route traffic over a network. But at the moment, the distributions of wealth are quite nuts. But if there is an overall "unfair" atmosphere in the crypto-economy, it's could make depending on this system of routing kinda suck in the long term, especially if peoples actual livelihoods are under the pressure of massive ad gaps. People "sell out" when they're perceiving some stress. If we go 'all-in' on this kind of system, it might actually end up creating the same kinds of de-facto power imbalances we see today with conventional social media. I'm not anti-cryptocurrency either. I actually own a little bit of cryptocurrency. I'm curious about its potential to dissolve existing dominance relationships non-violently. That said, I don't see it as an end. Moreso, I see it as a potential conduit of healthy, non-violent economic chaos. I also recognize that this strange new alien could be "out of the frying pan and into the fire".
  - storge 9y ago
    I read your comment and I picture a sort of information balkanization via endless whack-a-mole of privacy tech and organizational surveillance. It may just be how it will ever be.
keyboardhitter 9y ago
Thank you very much for taking time to thoroughly answer questions. that combined with whitepaper and faq has left a very good impression to me, both socially and technologically. Best of luck to your team!
neom 9y ago
Who is this being built for?
- g_simonsson 9y ago
  Anyone who wants to access the Internet without being surveilled or censored, and for anyone who wants to earn tokens by offering their bandwidth for relaying such traffic.
risho 9y ago
I saw this, realized I had never heard of it, and knew right away it had to be a blockchain. It all falls into place. Moving on.
storge 9y ago
Is there any thought given to the response to a node operator who is detected/proven to be operating the node for surveillance or compromise? What would the response be? Will tokens not be sold to such a node operator?
- saurik 9y ago
  The goal of our network is to make it so that the network is protected as much as possible from users running compromised nodes. If you are a single node, you should not be able to do anything against the network. As the number of nodes you are in the system increases, the probability you will be able to pull of various forms of attacks against users of the network also increases. We are working on documenting these security tradeoffs in detail in our whitepaper (and any attempt I make to describe them here will be less accurate and thereby dangerous ;P). However, it is worth noting at a super-super high level that we are hoping to get a large number of nodes running the network and we have parts of our system that involve proof of work in a way similar to a cryptocurrency blockchain like Bitcoin. If a node in the Bitcoin network is operating for the purpose of compromise, it need not be banned from mining blocks: the network is designed in a way to make it so that such a node would not be able to pull off the kinds of attacks that people care about unless it owns a significant percentage of the resources being applied to securing the network. Our network has similar properties.
  - storge 9y ago
    "We are working on documenting these security tradeoffs in detail in our whitepaper (and any attempt I make to describe them here will be less accurate and thereby dangerous ;P)." Maybe a whitelist of nodes themselves? (mostly in jest there) I suppose an agency with funding who can endlessly sockpuppet could gain a substantial portion of network nodes, but if they're unable to censor more than per-random-packet, a surveillance goal seems more likely. While this may not meet conventional definition of 'censorship', I wonder of the chilling effect. I suppose any such move toward a censorship-free network should expect surveillance. c'est la vie. Thank you for taking time to answer my question.
throw2016 9y ago
This is needed but there should be more insight into the current surveillance problem and how Orchid solves it. This seems to be focused on China. Because surveillance is a potentially serious problem, it should not be used cynically to market some new product that just adds another layer but doesn't really solve the problem. For the average person its not China or Russia but their own state that is a bigger problem as they have power over them and can interfere with activism, journalism, dissent etc. The intensive profiling by Google, Facebook and others is another problem. Was the Internet designed to be anonymous? Governments control access and can stomp down at will. ISPs and telcos know who you are, server and vpn providers know who you are, Facebook and Google have a lot of data on you. Only the very committed and technically adept can perhaps attempt any sort of anonymity. Something like Musk's satellites with some basic free access may perhaps be the first of many steps to some kind of anonymity.
Taniwha 9y ago
Can I set up a relay node now?
- saurik 9y ago
  Sorry, but we have not yet finished writing the code for this (let's just say it: "my fault" ;P). Even I am currently unable to start and integrate a new relay into a running network; this should be fixed in the near future and we will have all of our code available as open source under the AGPL3 license, and will be working hard to build up an inclusive community around the project.
kodablah 9y ago
I understand the plan is to be open source, but can someone help me understand why it's not developed in the open? I mean, you can tell people you're not accepting external input at this stage, but why not let people watch it being developed? I can't think of any reason that doesn't make me think that the goal may be openness/transparency but not the practice. Or did I miss the link to the repo?
- saurik 9y ago
  This is an interesting question; one which I feel for greatly, and one which we have been discussing internally. Not having this detail worked out before going public was probably a mistake of ours, particularly as now we keep getting distracted, but we are rapidly working on addressing the issue as quickly as possible. I am going to give you an answer to this but want to stress that this answer has not been vetted through anyone else and is a look behind the curtain (and I hope you can give us a little benefit of the doubt here, at least based on the track record of some of our developers). One issue is that we have put a lot of effort into the whitepaper, and we really want people to review the concepts in the whitepaper and give us feedback on that, but I will say that it is highly likely (if not a foregone conclusion) that if we have source code available, code which we know isn't done yet as the whitepaper design has been leading ahead of the implementation in the code, that we are going to have people only downloading the code and giving us feedback on the code... but what we really need is feedback on the design, not the first draft implementation :(. On the other side of this, our team includes someone from the Free Software Foundation who feels some strong moral pulls towards doing all of the development in the open immediately and yesterday. I have made sure that my code is ready to release on a moment's notice and still feel proud about what is out there (though there is one last super high-level thing in the organization of how the code for the network connects with code for services that I want to fix tonight, and issue that will be much easier to deal with fixing at the git level if I didn't think I'd be breaking anyone's clone).
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Thank you very much for the response. I empathize with the noise-vs-signal concerns with premature public feedback. Just wanted to share my thoughts because the first thing I look for in these cases is code. While y'all's credentials are clear, we've just seen so much snake oil in the decentralized tech industry.
confounded 9y ago
Why were venture capitalists interested in funding this? What do they get out of it? How and when do you intend to ‘exit’? (Apologies for the skeptical tone, I think this seems like a cool idea.)
- colordrops 9y ago
  Very good question that I'm curious about as well. The cynic inside me could think of some nefarious reasons, but I can also imagine some legitimate ones, such as taking a cut of the eth made in bandwidth transactions, and opening up markets for other services that were previously impenetrable, such as China.
- g_simonsson 9y ago
  Good question, especially since we made it clear to them that we have no business model and no plans to ever have one. There is a fixed number of Orchid Tokens that are used for payments within the network of relayed traffic (source nodes pay relay and exit nodes). The only way for anyone to gain financially is for these tokens to appreciate in value, which is tied to the utility of the network. So there's no exit, rather it's a continuous token incentive for all stakeholders similar to the Ethereum network which was funded by selling the promise of future tokens.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    The only way for anyone to gain financially is for these tokens to appreciate in value... Sounds like a security.
- api 9y ago
  Opening the Chinese market? As it stands the GFW implements a rather strong protectionist barrier. I've long suspected that to be it's main purpose.
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
It's Tor but with a worse website and more decentralised? I think the website could be better if it said right at the top what it actually does and what it offers over competing services.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  Hey man, Tor has been up for over a decade, but this isn't even in beta.
- r0fls 9y ago
  Are you talking about https://www.torproject.org https://www.torproject.org? We have different standards for websites it seems. That looks like it jumped out of the mid 90s to me.
  - herbst 9y ago
    brings over the point tho, which the above one doesnt (Otherwise i fully agree, but the orchid one also looks like a badly implemented modern default theme)
  - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    Tor’s website actually tells you what it does. And the design is nothing to scoff at. It’s not hip, but it’s functional and readable.
woodandsteel 9y ago
This sounds like a good idea. One problem with things like tor and i2p is you want to have tons of traffic so as to hide things from the various spies, but it is hard to get enough people to support nodes. Add a token and perhaps that problem will be solved.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  A token seems to solve the supply side (relay and exit nodes) but what about the demand side? Why would anyone who doesn't care about subverting censorship or surveillance pay for this?
  - g_simonsson 9y ago
    Because people currently pay for VPNs, and Orchid effectively provides some of the features of VPNs, with the added benefit that there is no central VPN provider who logs your (meta) data and sells it for profit. And as Orchid is a P2P market place with no middlemen or fees, it should find a market equilibrium that is more efficient than VPNs, with a lower price per data relayed.
    - tlrobinson 9y ago
      Does Orchid somehow prevent malicious exit nodes from inspecting/manipulating traffic? (requiring traffic be encrypted?) I'd consider that to be worse than the risk of a semi-trustworthy VPN provider keeping logs, depending on your threat model.
    - woodandsteel 9y ago
      >people currently pay for VPNs, and Orchid effectively provides some of the features of VPNs, with the added benefit that there is no central VPN provider who logs your (meta) data and sells it for profit. When you roll Orchid for use, I think this should be stated prominently on the web page as a way of selling it. Something like "If you are like millions of people, you use a vpn. But vpns have some problems" and so on.
bmc7505 9y ago
> This would be a disruptive inconvienance [sic] for Chinese business people, deeply effecting [sic] commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. This sentence has two typos. It should be changed to: > This would be a disruptive inconvenience for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. But TBH, stating that the lack of WebRTC or VPS web hosting would, "deeply affect the quality of life for the average Chinese citizen," seems like hyperbole. Maybe: > This would be a disruptive inconvenience for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce and web access for millions of Chinese citizens.
- saurik 9y ago
  You caught this answer right before it was updated with a much longer answer that I had written a couple days ago (and which fixes at least one of those typos). Would you mind reviewing it to see if you still think it is a stretch?
RoboTeddy 9y ago
What's the weakest point in the design so far?
- saurik 9y ago
  The answer you aren't looking for is probably something like "traffic cloaking" or "connection bootstrap", but my personal answer to that question is "so you sit down at a computer and download our software. you have a wallet full of cash and credit cards... now what?".
ve55 9y ago
There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and complete protocol. Ethereum has some amazing potential and technology behind it but I lost interest in this the second I saw they had already raised $5M and haven't even done their ICO yet. Their FAQ section seems woefully incomplete given this amount of money.
- herbst 9y ago
  This should be on the top. They did not even put a lot effort in their current presentation but already are millions "in dept". As novel as the idea sounds, i doubt this is it this time but lets hope for the best.
- ddevault 9y ago
  Check out cjdns for a less stupid, less blockchain BS take on fixing the internet. https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      Here's the tl;dr: a practical encrypted mesh network that can work over the traditional internet protocol (IP) or over real-world links and radio antennas.
      - kpcyrd 9y ago
        Since the parent was deleted and I couldn't comment by the time I finished typing, here's the non-tl;dr: The main advantage is non-hierarchical routing. Your ip address is in fact the fingerprint of your public key, which is used to encrypt all traffic. Because of this the address allocation works a lot different and there's no need for a central authority. The lack of a central authority is usually a problem if you ever tried to merge two large internal networks you might have run into the issue that both networks have used 10.0.0.1 for something. This isn't possible in cjdns because you can just generate as many key pairs as you want, which would map to one out of 2^120 possible addresses which are very unlikely to collide. Merging two networks is just a matter of configuring one or more peers and the networks are able to see each other (this is so easy, it might happen by accident). The main difference to other projects is that you don't need to write code to support it. If your application supports unicast ipv6, your application is able to run on top of cjdns.
Sniffnoy 9y ago
Regarding the alternative approaches section (which I'm assuming when complete will include an actual comparison to these alternative approaches?), another alternative approach you might want to mention is that improved mixnet approach that people were talking about last year, that once set up is supposed to be faster than Tor, or maybe mixnets in general since they seem to have a long history. Edit: Riffle, that's what it was called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riffle_(anonymity_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riffle_(anonymity_network)
MentallyRetired 9y ago
What would convince my mom to use this though?
- saurik 9y ago
  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.
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    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"?
    - saurik 9y ago
      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.
flotillo 9y ago
Why promote it now when you have nothing to release? Without any actual software to use and test, this just comes across as the usual overhyped ICO vaporware.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
paradite 9y ago
> we believe will force anyone trying to block our traffic to end up blocking large areas of the internet--such as every server being hosted on Amazon Web Services--which would cause a serious problem for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. Not really. China has several replacement solutions for AWS. Ali Cloud, Baidu Cloud, etc. It would just mean blocking a few more websites hosted on AWS and used by Chinese people, GitHub maybe? Then again, it is easy to build a GitHub clone within China with the decentralized (irony much?) git protocol.
- saurik 9y ago
  We believe, as do many people as far as I have seen, that if a country like China could block the entire world of Internet, they would. Regardless: I consider it my mission to make them have to seriously consider doing just that, and if I read a news report saying "in a shocking turn of events, China has decided to cut off all access to the Western Internet in an attempt to shut down Orchid", I will consider myself to have won that round, not lost ;P.
  - paradite 9y ago
    > I will consider myself to have won that round, not lost ;P. If fame and victory are what your company is going after, instead of taking care of your potential users, then I am sorry that you won't have my support. Btw, thank you for creating cydia if you were the author.
    - saurik 9y ago
      To "win" here means "win a battle on the road to an Internet free of surveillance". I (personally) firmly believe that if China were to do that, that the people would not stand for it; any form of "half solution" or "compromise position" where the Chinese govnerment can block just enough to remove access to material that bothers them while only minority inconveniencing users, is a world in which this form of freedom is actually less likely, as people are willing to tolerate a sad lot before try finally snap back :/. It is also worth noting that if they went that far, at least some of the other Western countries that are currently willing to tolerate their seemingly-limited control over the Internet would no longer feel comfortable standing idly by and might have to start making resolutions against them. Again: forcing that chess move from them would, in my (personal) book, be a strong win in this fight. FWIW, you seem to be taking a very short-term definition of "taking care of your potential users" that I have sometimes seen in attempts to make excuses for Apple over the past decade of my work on Cydia (such as when I have stated that one of my "win conditions" for Cydia Impactor is for Apple to remove entirely the Free Developer profile system), and I (personally: I do not speak for anyone else on my team when I say this) do not feel the loss of your support on this particular day (though maintain hope that in a few years you will thank us as you have now me for Cydia).
dmitrygr 9y ago
Ok, I wasted a few hours reading the whitepaper. It was just as idiotic as you'd expect. Here are a few notes: It seems like this takes Bitcoin and Ethereum electrical power waste to a whole new level To produce a medallion, a peer takes a public key K , and the most recent Ethereum block hash E , then (iteratively or in parallel) locates a salt S such that H ( K, E, S ) ≥ N , where N is some difficulty scaling factor. And with all that "an anonymous" network does not provide payment anonymity (while amount paid correlated with amount of data sent). So this will disclose how much data each user put into the network. This is valuable if you can observe large amounts of data out of the exit nodes (like a government-scale actor might). This might even allow correlation between data and users. We will argue that The Orchid Payments (section 7.12) fulfill all but the anonymity requirement. Yup... not anonymous at all... The pseudo-anonymity of Orchid payments is equivalent to what can be achieved in regular Ethereum transactions But it gets better. While you can use anyone as a relay, you PREPAY them before they do any work for you. This is claimed to solve the problem of nonpayment, but nobody mentions the opposite problem: I take your money and do no work for you. The money cannot be taken back - I own it now. cool. If there is some setup cost to Alice and Bob’s relationship ( S Alice , S Bob s.t. S Alice > xy, S Bob > xy ), the answer is yes. And for fun, it also messes with SSL. Allegedly only "for good", but who'll notice when this changes? (see the entire section 10 in whitepaper) And then there is the completely not scalable method to prove you will route as required by the network. For that you need to literally get EVERY node on the network to sign off on the fact that you can route to them. So the size of this proof, its computational cost, and the time to complete it will grow as the network does. Total work done just to provide for network joining grows as N^2. Oh, and god help you in case of temporary partitions (like has happened in the internet a number of times when various underwater cables were cut). For extra fun, nobody mandates you actually do route anything. Only that you prove you can. I see nothing in there that prevents packets from being purposefully dropped after collecting payment for "forwarding" them. (see whitepaper section 11.5) Oh, and if you thought this will provide INTERNET access, you are mistaken. Apparently HTTP w/ DNS only. As per whitepaper, exit nodes can filter based on domain. I am not even going to mention that running an exit node without a whitelist is idiotic (one user downloads CP, you go to jail). So everyone must have a whitelist? And just how big do you figure a typical "whitelist" of safe domains is? 100GB, 1000GB? Good thing you need to send it as a reply to Get Offers request. (see whitepaper section 11.9) Blocking this is easy (as the whitepaper concedes) by DPI and blocking Ethereum. Whitepaper claims "this will be solved later" but offers not even a handwavy explanation of how this will happen while remaining compatible with mainline Ethereum clients... (see whitepaper sections 12.3 & 15.3) Of course, besides handwaving on "it will totally be ok"(tm), there are no real world performance numbers. (see whitepaper section 13.3) But funny most of all, these guys didn't address the simplest attack of all. Pretend to be an exit node, /dev/null the traffic, pocket the payment. My guess: the scheme is simply to raise an ICO and laugh their way to the bank. (as always)
noddy1 9y ago
The liquidity offered by the token model means that early VC/hedgefund backers often get heavily discounted tokens in the presale, and can then turn round a month or two later and dump a portion of their tokens on public investors for a sweet profit or to mitigate their own risk. Polychain did this with 0x project: https://www.reddit.com/r/0xProject/comments/6w3zv0/0x_being_dumped_by_polychain_capital/ https://www.reddit.com/r/0xProject/comments/6w3zv0/0x_being_... The effect was attenuated in this case by the success of the project, however in lower performing ICO's like Kik's Kin, where the market price is 50% of public sale price or less, big early investors dunking on public token sale participants feels pretty wrong. In addition to this, VCs are also often playing a role in promoting public sales shortly after their own pre-sale investments, without disclosing their own discount or terms of obtaining tokens. Its kinda like telling people to buy a bunch of stock at $10 when you bought all yours last week for $5 and you're keen to dump a portion of them for $15. https://medium.com/@rzurrer/raiden-fundamental-infrastrucutre-led-by-a-great-team-96c725fba9de https://medium.com/@rzurrer/raiden-fundamental-infrastrucutr... It may be legal, you may think it's their right, and to be fair there is risk involved in being an early backer in a potentially failed project, however it is something to think about.
woodandsteel 9y ago
This sounds like a great project. I have some thoughts on how to communicate about it when it is ready to go. With the general public, you might start with some things they are unhappy about with the present internet, and for each of them explain how things would be better for them if they used Orchid. For the more techy minded, you could do a list of similar things like tor or IPFS, and for each of them explain how Orchid is similar or different, and what are your reasons for deciding to make it that way.
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  A further thought. You should focus on comparing it with Tor, like maybe making it the first one to compare with, since it is both similar and well-known. And then maybe add on other ones. Another thought: compare early on with Ethereum and IPFS. Yeah, they are really different things, but as soon as you say web decentralization, people who are not techies but read about such things will think of them, so you need to explain early on how this is different so they get pointed in the right direction.
ubertaco 9y ago
It seems like it's like Tor, except instead of just paying my ISP, I also now get to pay more money to use this new POC protocol with a subset of Tor's features. Am I missing something?
axonic 9y ago
In 5 years, how might this be changing our lives? What will I think of when I look back and think "I'm so happy that they created Orchid"?

378 points by apsec112 9y ago

anotheryou 9y ago

buzzwords I see. what does it do?

jv22222 9y ago
From the FAQ: The Orchid protocol uses an overlay network built upon the existing Internet, which is driven by a peer-to-peer tokenized bandwidth exchange. The orchid protocol is an open-source overlay network that runs on top of the Internet. Its fully decentralized, because rather than traffic being routed through central authorities—your ISP or your VPN—it’s instead routed randomly through a network of bandwidth contributors who sign up to share their surplus bandwidth and activate their Internet-connected device as a “node.” Users that want to access an uncensored Internet (bandwidth consumers) pay the bandwidth contributors in Orchid tokens through a peer-to-peer exchange. Because neither the traffic nor the payments can be monitored by central authorities, both contributors and consumers of bandwidth enjoy a fully anonymous, surveillance-free experience. Also of note: Who are the founders? Stephen Bell: Steve started companies in Europe, the U.S., and China before founding Trilogy VC China, where he spent 10 years backing Chinese seed stage startups. Brian J. Fox: Brian is an entrepreneur and open-source advocate, the first employee of the Free Software Foundation, and the author of the GNU Bash shell. Jay Freeman: Jay is a software engineer and the developer of the Cydia software distribution platform used on millions of jailbroken iOS devices. Gustav Simonsson: Gustav is an engineer and developer who helped launch Ethereum in 2015, working with core protocols, clients, and security auditing. Dr. Steven Waterhouse: Steven is an experienced investor and entrepreneur, having co-founded RPX Corp, led cryptocurrency projects at Fortress and Pantera Capital, and the Honeycomb product at Sun Microsystems. [Edit] I _think_ they are trying to create something like Etherium but for decentralized internet.
floatboth 9y ago
Like Tor, but with capitalism. Financial incentive for running relays.
- kunimu 9y ago
  It's worth noting that a financial incentive does not necessarily equal capitalism; if one were employing wage labour then it would constitute a capitalist system, as the M-C-M' circuit would be fulfilled.

qeternity 9y ago

They call it a protocol but this is very much a startup/ICO, having raised nearly $5m in seed. Not that there is anything wrong with this, it seems like a very cool project. But it does seem to be very intentionally presenting itself as something that is closer to a not-for-profit a la Tor.

saurik 9y ago
It is maybe worth noting that we had actually looked into whether we could be registered as a non-profit and still raise money by these means to build out our implementation and market it to the world, and that was simply not possible :/. We are, however, all deeply committed to open source, and are working on how to best ensure that this is enforced in the company's charter (such that even if there are any future changes, there will never be any fear). All of our work is to be released under the AGPL3; and, while we have filed for a patent, we will be licensing the patent to the world in a manner similar to how Mozilla manages their patent portfolio. Brian Fox, who is in charge of making sure we have a successful and inclusive open source project, was the original developer of the bash shell, was for a while the maintainer of GNU emacs, and was the first employee of the Free Software Foundation (as Richard Stallman was a volunteer), and so is keenly aware of how important it is for technology to be available to everyone.
- awakeasleep 9y ago
  This is.. very exciting & excellent :)

saurik 9y ago

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working on this project in charge of our smart contracts and payment logic. He was one of the core developers who worked on Ethereum, specifically focussing on blockchain security.

someguydave 9y ago
How do you solve the problem of penetrating NATs and firewalls without relying on a central coordination server?
- saurik 9y ago
  If I understand your question correctly, and you are looking at "how do we do hole punching and NAT traversal without a way to get your canonical external IP address", in addition to techniques that don't require that kind of functionality (such as modern routers with UPnP port forwarding support), other nodes on the network can run something analogous to ICE servers (we have yet to decide if it should literally be STUN or if we need to integrate it into the security model), so all you will need is the address and public key of another node (which you will need anyway in order to connect to the network).
  - someguydave 9y ago
    >so all you will need is the address and public key of another node (which you will need anyway in order to connect to the network). But this begs the question. How does the user get the public key and address of a node without connecting to a public directory? How does he know he's connecting to something trustworthy?
    - saurik 9y ago

xwvvvvwx 9y ago

This is a funded startup. How do they intend to make money?

kirillseva 9y ago
ICO
- saurik 9y ago
  Not exactly, though I can appreciate why it might seem like that at first glance; we are selling a "utility token". This distinction is interesting and important as we are not selling a token to raise money to do development, instead having taken on seed investors to help us get the right team of developers and advisors to do this initial build out. The sale of tokens will be made after we have this network fully working and launched, meaning that we are really targeting a group of people you might call "customers" who will buy bandwidth tokens (as opposed to "investors", which is the target market of an ICO).
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    “This distinction is interesting and important...” ...and will be at the eventual inquest I’m sure. https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0 https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0
HelloNurse 9y ago
Sustainability isn't even the greatest concern: where there are customers (people who pay for access to the network) there is a database of customers (in order to allow authentication) that has to be kept out of the grasp of government agencies.
- saurik 9y ago
  Actually, that's the great part about what we are doing: it is all built on Ethereum, so there is no centralized database, and the users are generally pseudonymous! OK, you might then say "isn't that just a decentralized database?", but in addition to a form of "probabilistic micropayments" that ends up shrouding most of the participants, we are also working on integrating other techniques to make the payments fully anonymous (and have brought on a team of advisors which includes a professor of cryptography who specializes in this area).

woodandsteel 9y ago

The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.

zzalpha 9y ago
How so? If it's under individual control, you'll just end up with sub-networks where people will agree to distribute that type of content. You cannot pair anonymity and security with censorship. They are fundamentally incompatible. So either accept that nasty content will be out there, or acknowledge that you don't actually want perfect anonymity and security.
- saurik 9y ago
  FWIW, if you look at Tor, Facebook now runs a hidden service that allows people to access Facebook's website. This is essentially the same thing as someone having provided a number of exit nodes that will only route to Facebook. The problem, though, is that this requires the client and maybe even the website to be modified to use the .onion URLs for all accesses back to the site (at least, any absolute URL on the site back to the site will cause a problem). I will personally contend that it is worth it to allow Facebook to do this, or to allow anyone to do this for any website, in order to get more people using the network for everything, as the more users you can get using the service to do normal traffic the more easily you can hide everyone. This is particularly noticeable given that in some countries, such as the United States where I live, simply accessing the Tor website to download Tor will end up flagging you for further monitoring. If Tor had only as many users and exit nodes as it does right now, but additionally had, for example, a billion people in China accessing Wikipedia through exit nodes that refused to go anywhere but Wikipedia, that makes a world of difference. As it stands, people are actually actively discouraged and even shamed for using Tor to access random websites or ones that use a lot of bandwidth, as that means that they are using (or even "abusing") a limited amount of donated bandwidth that somehow needs to be reserved for those who "really need it" (and thereby, will be targeted just for that). https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-nsa-targets-tor-users https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d73yd7/how-the-ns...

zzalpha 9y ago

How is this different from Freenet or Tor?

saurik 9y ago
(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".) Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technology, you might look at Tor, or the "out-proxies" from I2P).
- zzalpha 9y ago
  So what are the benefits over Tor?
  - HelloNurse 9y ago
    It seems intended to be more anonymous and decentralized than Tor, and safer thanks to the strength of numbers, but their whitepaper is diseharteningly incomplete and disingenuous, particularly about problems that are shared with Tor. For example: "The distribution of Entry Nodes is a difficult topic. If oppressive governments are able to access this list, they will block user’s abilities to access the list." Or simply, you know, go after whoever runs entry nodes. Or run their own entry nodes and, even if they can't compromise the network, trace the evil cypherpunks who want to use encryption. Unfortunately, some practical and political problems cannot be solved with improved cryptography.
    - g_simonsson 9y ago
      Certainly incomplete as it is still a draft, though I'd contest "dishearteningly". Also, why do you find it disingenuous? We're not shying away from what entry nodes and bootstrap of user clients is one of the hardest problems to solve.
  - 9y ago

natch 9y ago

Very interesting. Visited Noisebridge a while back and there was a post on the door telling visitors what to do when the FBI visits to ask about the TOR exit node. I wonder how this tool avoids the exit node problem. Also, from the FAQ: >Can't NSA just hack into this too? >No. Because of its fully decentralized approach, distributed architecture, and the size of the global network, Orchid cannot be easily hacked by any single government or entity. That's not really a satisfactory answer. First, it doesn't answer the question. The question was not "can NSA easily hack into this." And I don't think the NSA is necessarily deterred by something being not easy. The bar needs to be higher than not easy, even if "not easy" is a polite understatement. Also relying on the size of the network means there is a bootstrapping problem, right? Hopefully they will get there. This doesn't mean the system is bad... I'm just saying the FAQ answer is bad. On the positive side, given the cred of some of the people involved (saurik!) I am optimistic this may well have a shot at working.

saurik 9y ago
Ugh. FWIW: we agree. That FAQ answer was rewritten, and it failed to go on the website. Here is the updated text that was written a couple nights ago by one of the people who helped design the protocol with me after being confused by the answer on the website. > Yes. Our initial release targets China as the adversary, which is a more tractable problem. We may implment full Chaumian mixes in the future (which are immune to metadata/traffic analysis), but they are unlikely to be complete for our first public release.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Would you consider changing "China" to something like "Chinese government"? Or, if I'm understanding it correctly, maybe something like "Our initial release operates with a threat model of an authoritarian government's internet censorship, such as those seen in China, Turkey, or Russia."
  - saurik 9y ago
    I agree with this edit and have made a similar change, pushed it to our server, and are poking others for review. Thank you for your feedback: that is a much clearer answer (as otherwise it sounds like China is hacking into places as opposed to "we mean their firewall").

dharma1 9y ago

the project seems very cool. related: https://medium.com/@stevewaterhouse/how-token-sales-can-be-an-instrument-for-social-change-91b6d01792d0 https://medium.com/@stevewaterhouse/how-token-sales-can-be-a...

jampekka 9y ago

So the business plan is to become the oligarchs of the new network?

g_simonsson 9y ago
Hopefully not! Ideally token allocations are fair and do not skew ownership towards any individual or entity while still providing good incentives (we're still working on figuring out what good allocations look like)
- jampekka 9y ago
  Are there any public details on the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens? Sorry for nagging, but I'm one of those skeptical of greedy people acting maximally greedy saving the world as a process waste. Edit: typo
  - g_simonsson 9y ago
    The main reason there's currently not more details around the SAFT and the token model/allocations is that it would distract from the overall project and tech, given the current hype of blockchains and tokens. There's certainly economic incentives for all participants, and what I find interesting is that since we're open sourcing all the code, anyone can easily deploy another network with a different token (model). This puts pressure on us to propose fair token model/allocations else we risk disruption by forks or simply new Orchid networks.

halite 9y ago

When are they doing ICO!?

diaperIITB 9y ago

How is the route decided? If it uses a centralized server for that, then wouldn't it be easy to block that.

saurik 9y ago
We definitely do not have any centralized servers. The currently-specified mechanism to determine routes is that they are decided by connecting to a distributed peer-to-peer network that is modeled in many ways after a distributed hash table, at which point you do lookups of random keys in the hash space, which results in a randomized scalable lookup. There are mechanisms in play (and which I assume are already described in our in-progress whitepaper) to protect against eclipse attacks, sybil attacks, and some other miscellaneous attacks on the routing infrastructure. That said, this is also some ongoing work, and we are actively engaging with and being reviewed by people both in academia and in the field with respect to our techniques.

tbodt 9y ago

As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.

kovek 9y ago
Why? Do you understand Ethereum? I'd like to understand it better
- herbst 9y ago
  At this point it is either a magic buzzword to get investors throwing money at you or actually a smart thought of putting cryptographical proof into something. Usually its the first tho.
macawfish 9y ago
Call me zealous, but I'm the same way. I'm wary of the potential for monetary incentives to skew actual demand. I've seen how digital advertising has more or less destroyed much of the internet. Hopefully decentralization will prevent monopolies or oligopolies from forming, but I'm not so sure about that. At this point, it's hard to say what actual distributions of wealth might look like if people start using cryptocurrencies in their daily lives, for example to route traffic over a network. But at the moment, the distributions of wealth are quite nuts. But if there is an overall "unfair" atmosphere in the crypto-economy, it's could make depending on this system of routing kinda suck in the long term, especially if peoples actual livelihoods are under the pressure of massive ad gaps. People "sell out" when they're perceiving some stress. If we go 'all-in' on this kind of system, it might actually end up creating the same kinds of de-facto power imbalances we see today with conventional social media. I'm not anti-cryptocurrency either. I actually own a little bit of cryptocurrency. I'm curious about its potential to dissolve existing dominance relationships non-violently. That said, I don't see it as an end. Moreso, I see it as a potential conduit of healthy, non-violent economic chaos. I also recognize that this strange new alien could be "out of the frying pan and into the fire".
- storge 9y ago
  I read your comment and I picture a sort of information balkanization via endless whack-a-mole of privacy tech and organizational surveillance. It may just be how it will ever be.

keyboardhitter 9y ago

Thank you very much for taking time to thoroughly answer questions. that combined with whitepaper and faq has left a very good impression to me, both socially and technologically. Best of luck to your team!

neom 9y ago

Who is this being built for?

g_simonsson 9y ago
Anyone who wants to access the Internet without being surveilled or censored, and for anyone who wants to earn tokens by offering their bandwidth for relaying such traffic.

risho 9y ago

I saw this, realized I had never heard of it, and knew right away it had to be a blockchain. It all falls into place. Moving on.

storge 9y ago

Is there any thought given to the response to a node operator who is detected/proven to be operating the node for surveillance or compromise? What would the response be? Will tokens not be sold to such a node operator?

saurik 9y ago
The goal of our network is to make it so that the network is protected as much as possible from users running compromised nodes. If you are a single node, you should not be able to do anything against the network. As the number of nodes you are in the system increases, the probability you will be able to pull of various forms of attacks against users of the network also increases. We are working on documenting these security tradeoffs in detail in our whitepaper (and any attempt I make to describe them here will be less accurate and thereby dangerous ;P). However, it is worth noting at a super-super high level that we are hoping to get a large number of nodes running the network and we have parts of our system that involve proof of work in a way similar to a cryptocurrency blockchain like Bitcoin. If a node in the Bitcoin network is operating for the purpose of compromise, it need not be banned from mining blocks: the network is designed in a way to make it so that such a node would not be able to pull off the kinds of attacks that people care about unless it owns a significant percentage of the resources being applied to securing the network. Our network has similar properties.
- storge 9y ago
  "We are working on documenting these security tradeoffs in detail in our whitepaper (and any attempt I make to describe them here will be less accurate and thereby dangerous ;P)." Maybe a whitelist of nodes themselves? (mostly in jest there) I suppose an agency with funding who can endlessly sockpuppet could gain a substantial portion of network nodes, but if they're unable to censor more than per-random-packet, a surveillance goal seems more likely. While this may not meet conventional definition of 'censorship', I wonder of the chilling effect. I suppose any such move toward a censorship-free network should expect surveillance. c'est la vie. Thank you for taking time to answer my question.

throw2016 9y ago

This is needed but there should be more insight into the current surveillance problem and how Orchid solves it. This seems to be focused on China. Because surveillance is a potentially serious problem, it should not be used cynically to market some new product that just adds another layer but doesn't really solve the problem. For the average person its not China or Russia but their own state that is a bigger problem as they have power over them and can interfere with activism, journalism, dissent etc. The intensive profiling by Google, Facebook and others is another problem. Was the Internet designed to be anonymous? Governments control access and can stomp down at will. ISPs and telcos know who you are, server and vpn providers know who you are, Facebook and Google have a lot of data on you. Only the very committed and technically adept can perhaps attempt any sort of anonymity. Something like Musk's satellites with some basic free access may perhaps be the first of many steps to some kind of anonymity.

Taniwha 9y ago

Can I set up a relay node now?

saurik 9y ago
Sorry, but we have not yet finished writing the code for this (let's just say it: "my fault" ;P). Even I am currently unable to start and integrate a new relay into a running network; this should be fixed in the near future and we will have all of our code available as open source under the AGPL3 license, and will be working hard to build up an inclusive community around the project.

kodablah 9y ago

I understand the plan is to be open source, but can someone help me understand why it's not developed in the open? I mean, you can tell people you're not accepting external input at this stage, but why not let people watch it being developed? I can't think of any reason that doesn't make me think that the goal may be openness/transparency but not the practice. Or did I miss the link to the repo?

saurik 9y ago
This is an interesting question; one which I feel for greatly, and one which we have been discussing internally. Not having this detail worked out before going public was probably a mistake of ours, particularly as now we keep getting distracted, but we are rapidly working on addressing the issue as quickly as possible. I am going to give you an answer to this but want to stress that this answer has not been vetted through anyone else and is a look behind the curtain (and I hope you can give us a little benefit of the doubt here, at least based on the track record of some of our developers). One issue is that we have put a lot of effort into the whitepaper, and we really want people to review the concepts in the whitepaper and give us feedback on that, but I will say that it is highly likely (if not a foregone conclusion) that if we have source code available, code which we know isn't done yet as the whitepaper design has been leading ahead of the implementation in the code, that we are going to have people only downloading the code and giving us feedback on the code... but what we really need is feedback on the design, not the first draft implementation :(. On the other side of this, our team includes someone from the Free Software Foundation who feels some strong moral pulls towards doing all of the development in the open immediately and yesterday. I have made sure that my code is ready to release on a moment's notice and still feel proud about what is out there (though there is one last super high-level thing in the organization of how the code for the network connects with code for services that I want to fix tonight, and issue that will be much easier to deal with fixing at the git level if I didn't think I'd be breaking anyone's clone).
- kodablah 9y ago
  Thank you very much for the response. I empathize with the noise-vs-signal concerns with premature public feedback. Just wanted to share my thoughts because the first thing I look for in these cases is code. While y'all's credentials are clear, we've just seen so much snake oil in the decentralized tech industry.

confounded 9y ago

Why were venture capitalists interested in funding this? What do they get out of it? How and when do you intend to ‘exit’? (Apologies for the skeptical tone, I think this seems like a cool idea.)

colordrops 9y ago
Very good question that I'm curious about as well. The cynic inside me could think of some nefarious reasons, but I can also imagine some legitimate ones, such as taking a cut of the eth made in bandwidth transactions, and opening up markets for other services that were previously impenetrable, such as China.
g_simonsson 9y ago
Good question, especially since we made it clear to them that we have no business model and no plans to ever have one. There is a fixed number of Orchid Tokens that are used for payments within the network of relayed traffic (source nodes pay relay and exit nodes). The only way for anyone to gain financially is for these tokens to appreciate in value, which is tied to the utility of the network. So there's no exit, rather it's a continuous token incentive for all stakeholders similar to the Ethereum network which was funded by selling the promise of future tokens.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The only way for anyone to gain financially is for these tokens to appreciate in value... Sounds like a security.
api 9y ago
Opening the Chinese market? As it stands the GFW implements a rather strong protectionist barrier. I've long suspected that to be it's main purpose.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

It's Tor but with a worse website and more decentralised? I think the website could be better if it said right at the top what it actually does and what it offers over competing services.

woodandsteel 9y ago
Hey man, Tor has been up for over a decade, but this isn't even in beta.
r0fls 9y ago
Are you talking about https://www.torproject.org https://www.torproject.org? We have different standards for websites it seems. That looks like it jumped out of the mid 90s to me.
- herbst 9y ago
  brings over the point tho, which the above one doesnt (Otherwise i fully agree, but the orchid one also looks like a badly implemented modern default theme)
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  Tor’s website actually tells you what it does. And the design is nothing to scoff at. It’s not hip, but it’s functional and readable.

woodandsteel 9y ago

This sounds like a good idea. One problem with things like tor and i2p is you want to have tons of traffic so as to hide things from the various spies, but it is hard to get enough people to support nodes. Add a token and perhaps that problem will be solved.

tlrobinson 9y ago
A token seems to solve the supply side (relay and exit nodes) but what about the demand side? Why would anyone who doesn't care about subverting censorship or surveillance pay for this?
- g_simonsson 9y ago
  Because people currently pay for VPNs, and Orchid effectively provides some of the features of VPNs, with the added benefit that there is no central VPN provider who logs your (meta) data and sells it for profit. And as Orchid is a P2P market place with no middlemen or fees, it should find a market equilibrium that is more efficient than VPNs, with a lower price per data relayed.
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    Does Orchid somehow prevent malicious exit nodes from inspecting/manipulating traffic? (requiring traffic be encrypted?) I'd consider that to be worse than the risk of a semi-trustworthy VPN provider keeping logs, depending on your threat model.
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    >people currently pay for VPNs, and Orchid effectively provides some of the features of VPNs, with the added benefit that there is no central VPN provider who logs your (meta) data and sells it for profit. When you roll Orchid for use, I think this should be stated prominently on the web page as a way of selling it. Something like "If you are like millions of people, you use a vpn. But vpns have some problems" and so on.

bmc7505 9y ago

> This would be a disruptive inconvienance [sic] for Chinese business people, deeply effecting [sic] commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. This sentence has two typos. It should be changed to: > This would be a disruptive inconvenience for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. But TBH, stating that the lack of WebRTC or VPS web hosting would, "deeply affect the quality of life for the average Chinese citizen," seems like hyperbole. Maybe: > This would be a disruptive inconvenience for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce and web access for millions of Chinese citizens.

saurik 9y ago
You caught this answer right before it was updated with a much longer answer that I had written a couple days ago (and which fixes at least one of those typos). Would you mind reviewing it to see if you still think it is a stretch?

RoboTeddy 9y ago

What's the weakest point in the design so far?

saurik 9y ago
The answer you aren't looking for is probably something like "traffic cloaking" or "connection bootstrap", but my personal answer to that question is "so you sit down at a computer and download our software. you have a wallet full of cash and credit cards... now what?".

ve55 9y ago

There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and complete protocol. Ethereum has some amazing potential and technology behind it but I lost interest in this the second I saw they had already raised $5M and haven't even done their ICO yet. Their FAQ section seems woefully incomplete given this amount of money.

herbst 9y ago
This should be on the top. They did not even put a lot effort in their current presentation but already are millions "in dept". As novel as the idea sounds, i doubt this is it this time but lets hope for the best.
ddevault 9y ago
Check out cjdns for a less stupid, less blockchain BS take on fixing the internet. https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Here's the tl;dr: a practical encrypted mesh network that can work over the traditional internet protocol (IP) or over real-world links and radio antennas.
    - kpcyrd 9y ago
      Since the parent was deleted and I couldn't comment by the time I finished typing, here's the non-tl;dr: The main advantage is non-hierarchical routing. Your ip address is in fact the fingerprint of your public key, which is used to encrypt all traffic. Because of this the address allocation works a lot different and there's no need for a central authority. The lack of a central authority is usually a problem if you ever tried to merge two large internal networks you might have run into the issue that both networks have used 10.0.0.1 for something. This isn't possible in cjdns because you can just generate as many key pairs as you want, which would map to one out of 2^120 possible addresses which are very unlikely to collide. Merging two networks is just a matter of configuring one or more peers and the networks are able to see each other (this is so easy, it might happen by accident). The main difference to other projects is that you don't need to write code to support it. If your application supports unicast ipv6, your application is able to run on top of cjdns.

Sniffnoy 9y ago

Regarding the alternative approaches section (which I'm assuming when complete will include an actual comparison to these alternative approaches?), another alternative approach you might want to mention is that improved mixnet approach that people were talking about last year, that once set up is supposed to be faster than Tor, or maybe mixnets in general since they seem to have a long history. Edit: Riffle, that's what it was called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riffle_(anonymity_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riffle_(anonymity_network)

MentallyRetired 9y ago

What would convince my mom to use this though?

saurik 9y ago
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.
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  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"?
  - saurik 9y ago
    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.

flotillo 9y ago

Why promote it now when you have nothing to release? Without any actual software to use and test, this just comes across as the usual overhyped ICO vaporware.

deleted 9y ago

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paradite 9y ago

> we believe will force anyone trying to block our traffic to end up blocking large areas of the internet--such as every server being hosted on Amazon Web Services--which would cause a serious problem for Chinese business people, deeply affecting commerce, as well as quality of life for the average Chinese citizen. Not really. China has several replacement solutions for AWS. Ali Cloud, Baidu Cloud, etc. It would just mean blocking a few more websites hosted on AWS and used by Chinese people, GitHub maybe? Then again, it is easy to build a GitHub clone within China with the decentralized (irony much?) git protocol.

saurik 9y ago
We believe, as do many people as far as I have seen, that if a country like China could block the entire world of Internet, they would. Regardless: I consider it my mission to make them have to seriously consider doing just that, and if I read a news report saying "in a shocking turn of events, China has decided to cut off all access to the Western Internet in an attempt to shut down Orchid", I will consider myself to have won that round, not lost ;P.
- paradite 9y ago
  > I will consider myself to have won that round, not lost ;P. If fame and victory are what your company is going after, instead of taking care of your potential users, then I am sorry that you won't have my support. Btw, thank you for creating cydia if you were the author.
  - saurik 9y ago
    To "win" here means "win a battle on the road to an Internet free of surveillance". I (personally) firmly believe that if China were to do that, that the people would not stand for it; any form of "half solution" or "compromise position" where the Chinese govnerment can block just enough to remove access to material that bothers them while only minority inconveniencing users, is a world in which this form of freedom is actually less likely, as people are willing to tolerate a sad lot before try finally snap back :/. It is also worth noting that if they went that far, at least some of the other Western countries that are currently willing to tolerate their seemingly-limited control over the Internet would no longer feel comfortable standing idly by and might have to start making resolutions against them. Again: forcing that chess move from them would, in my (personal) book, be a strong win in this fight. FWIW, you seem to be taking a very short-term definition of "taking care of your potential users" that I have sometimes seen in attempts to make excuses for Apple over the past decade of my work on Cydia (such as when I have stated that one of my "win conditions" for Cydia Impactor is for Apple to remove entirely the Free Developer profile system), and I (personally: I do not speak for anyone else on my team when I say this) do not feel the loss of your support on this particular day (though maintain hope that in a few years you will thank us as you have now me for Cydia).

dmitrygr 9y ago

Ok, I wasted a few hours reading the whitepaper. It was just as idiotic as you'd expect. Here are a few notes: It seems like this takes Bitcoin and Ethereum electrical power waste to a whole new level To produce a medallion, a peer takes a public key K , and the most recent Ethereum block hash E , then (iteratively or in parallel) locates a salt S such that H ( K, E, S ) ≥ N , where N is some difficulty scaling factor. And with all that "an anonymous" network does not provide payment anonymity (while amount paid correlated with amount of data sent). So this will disclose how much data each user put into the network. This is valuable if you can observe large amounts of data out of the exit nodes (like a government-scale actor might). This might even allow correlation between data and users. We will argue that The Orchid Payments (section 7.12) fulfill all but the anonymity requirement. Yup... not anonymous at all... The pseudo-anonymity of Orchid payments is equivalent to what can be achieved in regular Ethereum transactions But it gets better. While you can use anyone as a relay, you PREPAY them before they do any work for you. This is claimed to solve the problem of nonpayment, but nobody mentions the opposite problem: I take your money and do no work for you. The money cannot be taken back - I own it now. cool. If there is some setup cost to Alice and Bob’s relationship ( S Alice , S Bob s.t. S Alice > xy, S Bob > xy ), the answer is yes. And for fun, it also messes with SSL. Allegedly only "for good", but who'll notice when this changes? (see the entire section 10 in whitepaper) And then there is the completely not scalable method to prove you will route as required by the network. For that you need to literally get EVERY node on the network to sign off on the fact that you can route to them. So the size of this proof, its computational cost, and the time to complete it will grow as the network does. Total work done just to provide for network joining grows as N^2. Oh, and god help you in case of temporary partitions (like has happened in the internet a number of times when various underwater cables were cut). For extra fun, nobody mandates you actually do route anything. Only that you prove you can. I see nothing in there that prevents packets from being purposefully dropped after collecting payment for "forwarding" them. (see whitepaper section 11.5) Oh, and if you thought this will provide INTERNET access, you are mistaken. Apparently HTTP w/ DNS only. As per whitepaper, exit nodes can filter based on domain. I am not even going to mention that running an exit node without a whitelist is idiotic (one user downloads CP, you go to jail). So everyone must have a whitelist? And just how big do you figure a typical "whitelist" of safe domains is? 100GB, 1000GB? Good thing you need to send it as a reply to Get Offers request. (see whitepaper section 11.9) Blocking this is easy (as the whitepaper concedes) by DPI and blocking Ethereum. Whitepaper claims "this will be solved later" but offers not even a handwavy explanation of how this will happen while remaining compatible with mainline Ethereum clients... (see whitepaper sections 12.3 & 15.3) Of course, besides handwaving on "it will totally be ok"(tm), there are no real world performance numbers. (see whitepaper section 13.3) But funny most of all, these guys didn't address the simplest attack of all. Pretend to be an exit node, /dev/null the traffic, pocket the payment. My guess: the scheme is simply to raise an ICO and laugh their way to the bank. (as always)

noddy1 9y ago

The liquidity offered by the token model means that early VC/hedgefund backers often get heavily discounted tokens in the presale, and can then turn round a month or two later and dump a portion of their tokens on public investors for a sweet profit or to mitigate their own risk. Polychain did this with 0x project: https://www.reddit.com/r/0xProject/comments/6w3zv0/0x_being_dumped_by_polychain_capital/ https://www.reddit.com/r/0xProject/comments/6w3zv0/0x_being_... The effect was attenuated in this case by the success of the project, however in lower performing ICO's like Kik's Kin, where the market price is 50% of public sale price or less, big early investors dunking on public token sale participants feels pretty wrong. In addition to this, VCs are also often playing a role in promoting public sales shortly after their own pre-sale investments, without disclosing their own discount or terms of obtaining tokens. Its kinda like telling people to buy a bunch of stock at $10 when you bought all yours last week for $5 and you're keen to dump a portion of them for $15. https://medium.com/@rzurrer/raiden-fundamental-infrastrucutre-led-by-a-great-team-96c725fba9de https://medium.com/@rzurrer/raiden-fundamental-infrastrucutr... It may be legal, you may think it's their right, and to be fair there is risk involved in being an early backer in a potentially failed project, however it is something to think about.

woodandsteel 9y ago

This sounds like a great project. I have some thoughts on how to communicate about it when it is ready to go. With the general public, you might start with some things they are unhappy about with the present internet, and for each of them explain how things would be better for them if they used Orchid. For the more techy minded, you could do a list of similar things like tor or IPFS, and for each of them explain how Orchid is similar or different, and what are your reasons for deciding to make it that way.

woodandsteel 9y ago
A further thought. You should focus on comparing it with Tor, like maybe making it the first one to compare with, since it is both similar and well-known. And then maybe add on other ones. Another thought: compare early on with Ethereum and IPFS. Yeah, they are really different things, but as soon as you say web decentralization, people who are not techies but read about such things will think of them, so you need to explain early on how this is different so they get pointed in the right direction.

ubertaco 9y ago

It seems like it's like Tor, except instead of just paying my ISP, I also now get to pay more money to use this new POC protocol with a subset of Tor's features. Am I missing something?

axonic 9y ago

In 5 years, how might this be changing our lives? What will I think of when I look back and think "I'm so happy that they created Orchid"?