I been trying to understand the difference between i2p to things like Tor and VPNs.

To my understanding, i2p is its own closed off network, meaning you cannot use i2p to access stuff outside of i2p like the clear net, onion domains, etc?

When using i2p, all traffic is relayed through other users in the i2p network like Tor but there is really no such thing as an exit node since you cannot access content outside of i2p?

Therefore i2p is good for hosting .i2p domains that can only be accessed in the i2p network and is good for P2P applications like Bittorrent?

Is this correct? Or am I still misunderstanding i2p?

And therefore could you and other users on i2p run a bitcoin nodes which will only be federated with bitcoin nodes with the i2p network and never federate with the rest of the bitcoin network, essentially making a fork of bitcoin blockchain on i2p?

And is there any other good use cases to i2p besides dark net websites and torrenting?

  • @[email protected]English
    4•1 day ago

    Oh, wow, never thought of using I2P as a way to “tunnel” your own VPN traffic into your network.

    So do you host an I2P proxy at the edge of your network, or does the traffic simply come through one of the outproxies into your public IP?

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 day ago

      I dont use the outproxies for ssh, but it should be possible to connect to my server using its clearnet address using one of the outproxies. I have i2pd running on my server 24/7, and an entry in the tunnels.conf file that points to 127.0.0.1:22 on the server. When I want to connect to it, Ill run another i2p router on whatever device im connecting to, and Ill put the “.b32.i2p” address into ssh while using the SOCKS proxy for it. It is possible to make a client entry in the tunnels.conf on whatever device you are connecting from, and you can even turn the hops down to 1, which will increase performance, but lower anonymity. I think by default the SOCKS proxy uses 3 hops, but it can be changed.

      But it should totally be possible to run your own private VPN over i2p, but Ive never done it myself, I just use ssh to port forward all of my self hosted stuff.