Quote from: smooth on July 28, 2014, 04:48:56 AM

Quote from: AnonyMint on July 28, 2014, 04:22:57 AM

if the relay nodes are Sybil attacked, and many people assume they are because who is providing all this relay traffic for free.

There are no dedicated relay nodes in i2p the way there are in Tor. I2p relies on a bit of social engineering for relay nodes, which is that relaying is turned on by default. So if you are using i2p, you are a relay node by default, and it can reasonably be assumed that most never change defaults. Even if a few do, the rest provide a large relay network sort of for free, but sort of in exchange for the benefit they receive by using the system.

lol I was literally in the middle of writing this so I'm gonna post it anyways:

If a financial network is running on that network, there is an implicit incentive to keep these nodes up and provided by the users of that network - IE they will potentially answer the "Who is providing all this bandwidth" question - it will be the users of the financial network. Also by doing this, you're (add:potentially) making the resources required to even perform timing attacks on one specific person orders of magnitude more expensive. Like this article: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/russia-research-identify-users-tor . If Russia had to offer 39m roubles, instead of 3.9m just to get some research (assuming the cost for research would scale in a similar fashion) .. that's a positive outlook.

also, can the latency/other technical aspects of the i2p network impede the ability for pools themselves to scale? Will you have more trouble dealing with so much traffic going to one place IE: will there be a specific number of people that can possibly connect to a pool before the 'luck' of that pool goes down due to increased traffic volumes? of course people can just mine it without i2p i guess, but does it at least present a situation where that can be possible?

Actually there's a quote in that article that stands out heavily to me:

Quote

Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory as an "onion routing project", Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows users to hide the source and destination of their internet browsing and keeps websites from tracking them.

I was not aware that it was developed by USNRL. Guess I'll need some more history lessons here. Current thoughts on this - if USNRL thought this was going to offer a suitable usage case for their communications at one point .. do they still think so and have they worked out bugs we're dealing with right now .. or have they moved onto something totally different? More on this - could one of the reasons that these types of communications are not currently outlawed or banned in some countries be because these specific forms of communication transmission are currently serving their stated purpose?