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About Freenet, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216177 I2P was rather like the love child of Freenet an

About Freenet, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216177 I2P was rather like the love child of Freenet and Tor. Like Freenet, it's pure P2P, where all users route traffic for each other. And although there are outproxies to the open Internet, it's mostly about I2P-hosted content. If anything, it's mostly like Tor onion services. It uses a version of Tor's onion routing, called garlic routing. The main difference is that I2P tunnels are unidirectional, whereas Tor tunnels are bidirectional. That will allow for content caching and bundling, but that's not implemented yet. There are reportedly ~10^4 I2P nodes, versus ~2x10^6 Tor users and ~6x10^3 relays. It's been argued that unidirectional tunnels are harder to deanonymize than bidirectional tunnels. But on the other hand, all I2P nodes are readily discoverable by malicious peers, but Tor users are much harder to discover, because Tor clients don't change guards frequently. So bottom line, they arguably provide similar anonymity. Edit: Yes, guards can discover users. But Tor is designed to make it hard for a given guard to see that many users. So you'd need lots of guards. And that's not so easy, because Tor folk are constantly on the lookout for suspicious guards, especially when a bunch show up at the same time.

Astarte 7y ago
> but Tor users are much harder to discover, because Tor clients don't change guards frequently. I don't get that. Every guard can discover users because the users directly connect to guard nodes. As a guard you can just collect the real IP addresses of Tor users except they use a VPN or proxy to connect to the Tor network.
Astarte 7y ago
>So you'd need lots of guards Can't edit my other reply. The operator in the OP runs 68 nodes. I did not look at each one, but it looks like most, if not all of them are guard nodes. This article mentions someone running at least 10% of the guard capacity: https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-relays-on-the-tor-network-2f14198af548?source=---------5------------------ https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-... Tor's design obviously failed. Everyone can become a guard. You just need some patience. Also other nodes like DirAuths, bridges, fallback directories can discover Tor users.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yes, that is an issue for Tor. But it's still arguably worse for I2P, because all peers can connect to each other. But regardless, that's why I never use Tor or I2P from home, except through nested VPN chains. I don't care so much about VPS, because I'm very careful to isolate myself from them. For dedicated servers, however, which are more expensive, and where I invest more work for setup, I also use nested VPN chains.

Astarte 7y ago

> but Tor users are much harder to discover, because Tor clients don't change guards frequently. I don't get that. Every guard can discover users because the users directly connect to guard nodes. As a guard you can just collect the real IP addresses of Tor users except they use a VPN or proxy to connect to the Tor network.

Astarte 7y ago

>So you'd need lots of guards Can't edit my other reply. The operator in the OP runs 68 nodes. I did not look at each one, but it looks like most, if not all of them are guard nodes. This article mentions someone running at least 10% of the guard capacity: https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-relays-on-the-tor-network-2f14198af548?source=---------5------------------ https://medium.com/@nusenu/the-growing-problem-of-malicious-... Tor's design obviously failed. Everyone can become a guard. You just need some patience. Also other nodes like DirAuths, bridges, fallback directories can discover Tor users.

mirimir 7y ago
Yes, that is an issue for Tor. But it's still arguably worse for I2P, because all peers can connect to each other. But regardless, that's why I never use Tor or I2P from home, except through nested VPN chains. I don't care so much about VPS, because I'm very careful to isolate myself from them. For dedicated servers, however, which are more expensive, and where I invest more work for setup, I also use nested VPN chains.