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Comment by northwest | Hacker News Reader

The other "darknet" options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29

The most complete one seems to be http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

Retroshare is F2F (darknet) network. But Freenet and GNUnet provide generic anonymous networking (with efficient caching!), without you setting up contacts with your peers beforehand. Network where you can access only preknown resources isn't that useful after all. At least for finding new peers. Think about web browser, if you could only open pages which urls you already know. Who needs Google for anything? With retroshare all resources are gone if you delete those, with Freenet & GNUnet you simply can't delete anything. Very different design. Plz read white and design papers.

Also see: http://secushare.org/

> With retroshare all resources are gone if you delete those, with Freenet & GNUnet you simply can't delete anything.

Sure, that's true and the advantage of Freenet and GNUnet. The flip side of the caching is of course that this comes at a cost: It takes a lot more resources to have this kind of redundancy.

RetroShare btw does let you download files anonymously from friends-of-friends etc. if the "owner" agrees to it. (You only have to know your immediate friends.)

Yes, but redundancy also means that resources are never unavailable due overload etc. As hacker news users know, sites with most interesting new content are often down. With efficient caching, that simply won't happen. Btw. BitTorrent could utilize caching also much more efficiently.

I know RS allows TurtleHopping, which is extremely inefficient method of transferring data, compared to GNUnets solution. With GNUnet you can transfer data directly with the source anonymously, while also at the very same time creating new sources for that data.

I think insisting on anonymous communication for bulk data transfer is fatal: Crippling performance is too strong an impediment for most people. The primary complaint most people have with these systems is that they are too slow but few devs seem to be listening.

Cryptosphere forgoes anonymous transfers and seems promising.

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