What if that server were under the control of the NSA? In any case, your description > The message would arrive at a server and tell the server "I'm going thi

What if that server were under the control of the NSA? In any case, your description > The message would arrive at a server and tell the server "I'm going this way." and the server forwards the message in a direction rather on a specific path to some destination. pretty much matches the idea of the IP protocol built on top of point-to-point connections. The problem is that you still need to specify a direction and that helps an attacker identify and track messages from sender to receiver. Look at it from a different angle: The most extreme version of a "one ticket west" algorithm would be one where your message would get broadcast to (or eventually pass by) all participants of the network and all of them would check whether the message is meant for them (e.g. by trying to decrypt it). Needless to say, this doesn't scale well at all, especially not for sending anything bigger than pure text. OTOH this is certainly the broadest sense of direction one could possibly think of and there would be no possible way for Eve to discern to whom Alice is sending her message. Contrast this with direct 1-to-1 connections between Alice and Bob. Any eavesdropper would immediately see Alice's and Bob's IP address. Now in between these two extremes lie "semi-direct" messages where the path that the message takes is – at the word says – not direct but instead gets obfuscated by some algorithm. (Your idea being one version of that.) Unfortunately, coming up with a good algorithm is anything but simple and the danger is that a nation state actor with sufficient power would still be able to "hack" the algorithm and undo the obfuscation. This is precisely what the people at Tor and GNUnet are concerned with.