> Thanks for contributing to I2P!

;) My contributions are relatively minor and I2P (as well as other crypto systems) is something I really believe in.

> Do you have any thoughts on HORNET? Could I2P benefit from a more stateless routing mechanism as opposed to tunnels in the far future?

It's been a while since I read the HORNET paper, but as I remember it, HORNET relied heavily on ISP level cooperation which is just not realistic. However, the idea of reducing state is a very good one. Going forward I hope to see more cryptographic systems that aspire to reduce overall state.

> I'm working on Go implementation here: https://github.com/hkparker/go-i2p. Haven't made to irc2p to introduce myself yet but I will. Are there any devs who might be interested in contributing?

Currently there are 3 implementations of I2P apart from yours. The original java one, i2pd[1] and kovri[2]. We all cooperate and discuss specifications to maintain interoperability. However the alternative implementations are not maintained under the I2P project as the developers of them desire to be separate. I was previously unaware of your Go implementation, but you should definitely head over to #i2p-dev and say hi. You can find me under the nick hottuna there.

> Privacy of developers seems a priority. Without any detail of course, can you comment on how necessary this has been. Is it irresponsible of me to work on an implementation in the clear?

About privacy, people have taken various stances. Some a truly anonymous, some are semi anonymous, and some like me are not anonymous. Maintaining privacy for a while might be a good idea. You can always get less anonymous, but going the other way is harder.

[1] https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd

[2] https://github.com/monero-project/kovri

Some of the Monero Kovri developers are known, public people, there's no problem with that at all if you choose to be public. There's really no longer as much of a stigma for people who are working on privacy projects:)

I am quite interested in go-i2p myself. How usable is it?

As for HORNET, I saw a minor Go impl of the ideas [0] along w/ a tiny mailing list post [1]. While it does appear to be made for backbone network devices, I believe the concept of onion routing w/ basically multi-hop TLS can be done in layer 7. I think the one thing missing is an implementation people can use and depend on (definitely outside of my present abilities).

0 - https://github.com/LightningNetwork/lightning-onion 1 - https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

Nice, I would love to contribute!

I don't think it's much of an issue to work on i2p in the clear. It may be that is a main component why tor was able to thrive so well, their developers weren't shadowy internet nyms so people felt more comfortable giving money to fund them. The dev channel is also on freenode via #i2p-dev if anyone wants to join and contribute.

Yes, you asked the cardinal question.

Tor and I2P critically rely on donations. Incentive design has been an unsolved problem for decades. Bittorrent advanced the field with a very simple and effective T4T. There is a famous blogpost from 2014 giving the state-of-the-art in privacy-enhancing technology incentives: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-incentives-research-rou...

I'm leading a research group at a university who has worked on this since 2007, see our initial collaborative work with Harvard University "Bandwidth as a Currency": https://www.google.com/webhp?q=bandwidth+as+a+currency

We need "privacy credits/coins" if we want Tor/I2P/Tribler to scale to numerous millions of users.

The incentive works in a kind of round about way, where the more nodes you talk to the more nodes you know and therefore the more fast/high capacity you know and can choose from.

So sharing more bandwidth leads to you knowing more nodes, which means you'll have better tunnels. So there is an incentive for you to share more.

> What are the best ways to obscure I2P use from ISPs and other network observers? Is it workable to use commercial VPNs with port forwarding?

I can't tell you a lot about obscuring I2P usage, personally I typically get a cheap VPS somewhere and do ssh/autossh port forwarding to it, but not for privacy reasons.

> Also, how workable is nesting I2P in Tor, and vice versa? For example, can I2P nodes be Tor onion services? At one point, the JonDo client had a Tor SOCKS5 proxy option. Is that possible with I2P?

Running I2P inside Tor or vice versa is common idea. I can't tell you if it is practically possible, but technically it is. However a setup like that does suffer from diminishing returns in terms of security and performance.

There is an I2P plugin called Orchid[1] that adds Tor outproxying to the regular internet to I2P.

[1] http://plugins.i2p/plugins/orchid/

zzz is our BDFL. If you really would like to know, come meet the I2P folks at 33C3 or potentially HOPE if you live in NA. CCC is better since I2P typically has a table there.