Where do you see I2P in five years?

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lgillis
Posts: 144
Joined: 20 Oct 2018 12:52

Where do you see I2P in five years?

Post by lgillis »

A question for those who have accompanied I2P intensively over the years and have in fact made it what it is today. Have your expectations been met in terms of actual visible use? What is the future of the I2P network, what direction should it take? Can it gain participants or will it lose even more politically interested people to the regular platforms that have been added on the Internet? Where do you see I2P in five years?
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zlatinb

Re: Where do you see I2P in five years?

Post by zlatinb »

Hi, I'll have a stab at this.

Five years is a long time, and the answer to the question of where I see I2P is different from the answer to the question where I "would like to" see I2P. There are two major categories of factors that influence what will happen: internal and external.

Internal factors are those who are somewhat under our control, like how well I2P performs and how easy it is to use. We've done a lot of work in the last few years of increasing speeds and performance; as far as ease-of-use we've picked all the low-hanging fruit with the jpackaged installers for Windows and Mac OS. There is still some work to be done on the performance side before we hit some theoretical limits, but there is a lot of work that can be done on the ease-of-use side.

External factors are basically the global demand for something like I2P and whether there will be hostile actions by entities in power. One of the main strengths of I2P is that it supposedly works when Tor and VPNs don't work, or at least I've received several independent reports that is the case. But maybe that is because I2P is so small that it slides under the radar, and maybe if it grows enough it will no longer work. That remains to be seen.

I would like to see I2P be the go-to tool for activists in oppressive regimes, and I would like it to work so well that those regimes would give up on trying to interfere with the internet. But I'm not optimistic that will happen. I wrote a longer article on the interaction between I2P and societies on Medium (clearnet) as well as on my blog (in-i2p) that lists my speculations as to what will actually happen.
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lgillis
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Re: Where do you see I2P in five years?

Post by lgillis »

I'm glad you took the time. I read your post in translation and, of course, the blog article to which you specifically refer. Then I considered whether and how to respond appropriately to your essay and hopefully the essays that follow. But no matter what the response would be, it would always amount to an assessment, or could be interpreted that way. The idea of "I2P" has been around for about two decades, and while some participants want to darken the P2P network in the long term, others cling to the original guideline, the so-called "I2P Philosophy" from 2003, with its almost naive demand for "a more free society". So let's follow the main goal of this worldview and ensure freedom of expression, not only by technical means.
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mixi
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Joined: 26 Nov 2022 20:13

Re: Where do you see I2P in five years?

Post by mixi »

as monero is to bitcoin, i2p will be to tor

tor/btc will remain easier access for newbies and hence always have a place, but the true privacy minded know that it is worth it to learn.

just as free-markets try to urge people to use monero, they will urge them to find their i2p site.

in my hopeful opinion
MiXYsFHYS1tt3St3 of MiXYclan

http://mixy.i2p
http://MiXY.i2p/?i2paddresshelper=dkrcbn7eeqbxiglh4hdwuzuvnkvxg56l5qqshrjuuq26sgydeaxq.b32.i2p

mixy@mail.i2p
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aberration
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Re: Where do you see I2P in five years?

Post by aberration »

I could be biased, probably am. But I feel as of recent, many privacy, hacker & anonymity spaces on the darknet have been more and more accepting of I2P as a worthwhile option.

It is one thing to be curious and duckduckgo "darknets other than Tor/onion network" and go down the rabbit hole of projects like i2p and freenet and whatnot while paying no mind of actually changing their operation. And there is another thing that one genuinely considers changing the operation that felt stable for a long time because what they thought was the best option is challenged. The centralization of Tor is a massive problem. It doesn't take much to realize how problematic the fact that (too lazy to get the exact metric, but I am very sure it is less than 4%) a very low percentage of users decide to donate bandwidth by operating even a middle relay. It challenges the notion of the security of the network. It's common knowledge that those who operate exit nodes take significant flak for LE (if they are not part of LE or something greater governmental wise), what incentives are there? The privileged access of data, that can be used to attack privacy and anonymity itself of course.

I2P forces, or at least makes it a default for those using the network to become their own scaled version of a tor relay. This is a significant difference that I believe ensures not only security but sustainability by not reverting into centralization.
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