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Comment by miketery | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty awesome. What are the missing pieces to get people using this? Is there a need?

I think it's being able to launch infrastructure like AWS but for consumers. Imagine one click to launch your "virtual home" / bastion. You can mange your virtual home from trusted devices (desktop, mobile, possibly web if you grant keys to 3rd party). In your virtual home you can setup I2P, a personal VPN (e.g. algo by trailofbits), tunnel/forward home server traffic to public internet (e.g. RPi), install torrent client & fire sharing drive for family, etc.

Thoughts?

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>What are the missing pieces to get people using this?

It's generally slow and it needs port forwarding to work correctly. Its design (whether you look at the java router, I2P, or the C++ one, i2pd) isn't really noob-friendly, either. That's more than enough to deter almost everyone from using it, it seems.

>Is there a need?

I'd say there's an ever-increasing need for anonymous, uncensorable platforms on the Internet. I wager we will progressively notice an urgency to turn to this kind of applications in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong on this one, but I don't think my guess will be too far off.

>it needs port forwarding to work correctly

What are you talking about? You need to put a proxy 127.0.0.1:4444 into your browser setup, but I wouldn't call it "port forwarding". Apart from that, you just install it and go to the eepsites. Upd: Indeed, you will also have to wait until the router finds enough peers.

>What are the missing pieces to get people using this?

I would say, it only needs more people to know about it.

A firewalled router will not work correctly (it will be slow as hell, basically, and you'll be leeching off the network instead of contributing to it). I appreciate the project as much as anyone interested in it, but let's be real here. On top of that, no router will work efficiently right after installation, firewalled or otherwise. You have to give it time to find other routers and make connections. It's just not suited for the immediateness almost everyone expects from everything nowadays. It needs a major revamp in order to increase its adoption.

This is all true. However if the goal is convenience, speed and adoption, one could decrease the number of hops and it will work much faster.

> and you'll be leeching off the network instead of contributing to it

Does not look like a problem in Tor (despite one would expect otherwise, given that by default you do not contribute back unlike in i2p). You just need enough seeders.

Most of these p2p systems need port forwarding. Which half the isps seem to block with botched cgnat deployments.

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