Here’s the scary sounding part that can be counterintuitive. The routers you’re communicating with do know your ip, since they have to like you mentioned. Your ip address is also in i2p’s DHT as a “router info” which functions as a network addressbook for routers and services so things can be found without needing a centralized lookup service. Again, because for the network to work, routers need to be able to find eachother, or they can’t communicate.

But, routers function on a need to know basis. i2p uses separate up and down links for each tunnel, and your side of the tunnel by default has 3 hops. other side usually also has 3 hops. typical unidirectional tunnel looks like this with total of 7 hops:

A-x-x-x=x-x-x-B

None of the chains in the link know what position they’re in (except for the endpoints). They also don’t know how long the whole tunnel is. The sender and receiver only know their parts of the tunnel. On the dht side, by design no single router has a whole view of the network, but there isn’t a whole lot of information you get from that other than knowing that person at stated ip address uses i2p, which your isp would be able to tell for example anyway just like using tor or a vpn. There’s no reason to try to obfuscate that except for getting around restrictive countries firewalls.

The way i made sense of it was like you have an envelope that is inside several other envelopes, with each envelope representing a layer of encryption. You get an envelope from kevin, so you know kevin. You open the envelope and see another envelope addressed to george, you give the envelope to him. So you know kevin and george. But the rest is unknown to you. You don’t know who the true originator of the envelope is or where the message is ultimately going.

Not a perfect analogy, but because of this the ultimate sender and receiver are blind to each others ip address. It’s layered encryption allowing this to happen which is similar to onion routing. Called garlic routing in i2p since there are some tweaks.

https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/garlic-routing

yeah some of the docs on the official site lean more technical than practical

similar yes but not the same. tor held together by volunteer that run nodes, i2p everyone is a node. tor good for clearnet things, i2p good for in-network things. torrenting in i2p is good for i2p, not tor. torrenting in i2p stays in the i2p network, doesn’t go through exit nodes. there’s only about 3 of those. it’s torrenting as a darknet hidden service.

It’s 2024 back that shit up on a dictaphone already

You can do multihoming, might be the easiest thing to do for a service: https://geti2p.net/spec/proposals/140-invisible-multihoming

Multihoming is a pretty simple way of load balancing and i think the way it works is the last router to announce is the one that’s used, so it should cycle through all routers periodically.

It’s also used to place i2p routers hosting a service in multiple places so it makes correlation attacks (ex downtime at exact time of a known electric outage in an area) more difficult.

Backend setup for your service

If we have a service like an http proxy service or a website available on port 6000, and 2 i2p routers, they’d both need access to that port. An outproxy may do this with port forwarding from a clean outernet connection(s) going through their proxy setup ex privoxy/haproxy/tinyproxy dns. They’re less worried about correlation attacks so the routers may be all or mostly in one area using port forwarding over lan or VM’s. A website that’s concerned about correlation attacks may have separate instances of the website running on each router in different areas, with the website’s backend syncing with the other routers in the background through other methods such as an encrypted lease-set.

Router setup

Each router needs the same exact key for the actual .i2p address. The easy way to do this is in the java router (i2p+ is good for this, install guide/official site go to service tunnels > make new server http tunnel, enter the port 6000, give it a name like “Outproxy”, private key file a name like “outproxy.dat” and make sure optimize for Multihoming is on.

Other recommended additions in your tunnel config

• Automatically start tunnel: on
• TOTAL of 16 tunnels in/out (maximum) across all routers: 3 hops for good anonymity, outproxies not concerned with their own anonymity could reduce this for more performance. If you have 2 routers, use 8 tunnels for each.
• Reduce tunnels to conserve resources: idle period 15-20 minutes, reduced count: low number like 2-3. This usually works well since the tunnels can be built back in an order of ms’s on a good i2p router and not wasting resources keeping them open. It could introduce a slight delay though. High traffic situations might make sense to leave that off.

Then save and start, key file is generated.

Copy key file and a tunnel config file

Locations for .config file and key (.dat):

/i2p/.i2p/outproxy.dat

/i2p/.i2p/i2ptunnel.config.d/XX-outproxy-i2ptunnel.config

Then copy the key and config files to the other i2p routers in the same locations. Shouldn’t need to go through setup with the config file present. Most important is it has the same key file, so they’ll all use the same address.

stormycloud is the biggest, there’s also acetone and purokishi that are both very reliable. there’s a couple others that aren’t as stable right now. i2p’s about inter-network services that often work without any need of the clearnet, tor is a better option if you’re looking to do clearnet things.

torrents don’t get bridged through the (mainly 3!) outproxies in i2p. they’re bridged by random people cross-seeding torrents through clients like qbittorrent or bigly bt which work in both i2p and clearnet. Or, you can download a torrent from clearnet normally and change the trackers to i2p only trackers, then add to i2psnark. In both cases using biglybt/qbittorrent you should be able to connect to peers from i2p and clearnet through the people that do this, functioning as your own outproxy in a way.

Anyone can easily bring over clearnet torrents into i2p, and they are more than welcome to do so!

So i’m not disagreeing with you about i2p needing more outproxies, more is better, but tor does this already (and arguably does it better since there’s so many exit nodes) so i don’t think the demand is as big. You’re right that it’s pretty similar running an i2p proxy. As far as i know it’s a very similar process running tor exit nodes vs i2p outproxy, i think acetone is also a tor exit node (i might be wrong on that), purokishi routes some things through tor, and stormycloud until somewhat recently mainly focused on running a fleet of tor exit nodes.

The nature of i2p means that to get faster speeds these providers may be running many i2p routers to provide lots of tunnels and load balance them, so i think that aspect is more technically challenging but i’ve never done it at scale myself. I think you’d need a handful of well resourced/connected i2p routers to offer a consistently good outproxy service.

also just known as regular socks if you use i2p

it’s generally advisable to not run a vpn in front of i2p. it will run better without one and you introduce another point of failure that can reduce your anonymity in some circumstances.

you can use a vpn for clearnet like normal along with i2p,ideally i2p not through the vpn though. it’s a good way to cross-seed stuff into i2p though (you can do this as you’re downloading from clearnet peers) and every now and again might find some random i2p seed holdout on a “rare” torrent.

we’re trying, also some clients will let you do that. snark and XD are i2p only, qbittorrent and bigly bt will let you pull peers from clearnet and i2p if they’ve been cross-seeded

easiest to get going is probably https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall

when you get it running allow the router to run for a while. the longer you leave it running the better connected it’ll become, it takes some time to get well connected into the network. torrenting right away is a good way to speedrun this since it’ll discover a lot of peers this way. to browse eepsites (.i2p domains, kind of like .onion) router needs to be running, and need to change proxy settings in browser.

there are guides and plugins for this but basically you want to set http proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 4444. it will proxy everything through the router. clearnet sites should go through the default outproxy (stormycloud) but i2p isn’t really build for clearnet browsing. if it’s working should be able to visit an eepsite like http://notbob.i2p (has a registry of other eepsites). things like trackers, forums, git repositories can be found on notbob.

can setup irc through it (comes preconfigured) and has built in torrent client (i2psnark). can also setup email, java router has that built in, as well as a webserver to host your own site through i2p.

if you just want to torrent biglybt comes with a router on its own, settings under “i2p helper” plugin if you just want to torrent through it without all the other stuff.

good to hear, couple new uploaders have been popping up so maybe things will get more rounded

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