[tor-talk] Bittorrent starting to move entirely within anonymous overlay nets

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 12:41:51PM +0200, Aymeric Vitte wrote:
> Le 17/06/2016 à 06:55, grarpamp a écrit :
> > On 6/10/16, Mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:
> >> But there's still the traffic load. Or maybe, one could consider it as
> >> chaff. Just sort of, though. Right?
> > If that's the old "OMG, too much" argument... load re anon overlay nets
> > may be more like bitcoin's interrelated variables... difficulty, txfees, reward,
> > watts, price, txrate, etc... they'll slide nicely around to compensate until
> > some unsolveable fundamental limit is reached. ie:
> > Private (non-exit/I2P) use of these nets... if they slow, users will start
> > talking urging more nodes, which they'll readily deploy themselves since
> > private is low risk and satiates their use case. If the required node count
> > to support n-million users starts blowing up CPU/RAM, devs will
> > start getting poked to work on layering that. Even parallel nets
> > with usage charters may arise by then as a given networks adversary
> > resistance begets users begets trust begets honoring narrower charter.
> > Besides, load happens to useful nets, no point trying to stave it off
> > (nets are anon so staving is a no anyway), and trying to stave makes
> > the stavers look stupid.
> > A little education helps too, users will self regulate if they sense that,
> > "Oh shit, I know this net is used for <insert activism I like>, but I can't
> > even get my own <whatever> through, so I better ease up on variable <x>".
> 
> Even if an interesting move as you described (ie onions + onioncat) I
> don't really think that it can scale to the extent required by a bt p2p
> network, I don't think either that using hidden services is a good
> solution to reach peers, and is it not an issue to have potentially
> plenty of new nodes (peers) relaying the Tor traffic and decreasing the
> efficiency of the Tor circuits due to their upload bandwidth?

Those are not grarpamp's point - as load increases toi the point where the
network has some actual "problem", this will motivate various people to do
those things required to actually improve the network.

The fed guys might be pissed because their little spy comms network has a
problem, but soon enough, those problems will get solved, be sure of that
:)

Now, I would personally advise against something which would be known to
stress the network to the point of failure, e.g. changing a very popular
torrent software default config on the latest auto update to default to
Tor or I2P only.

But, I certainly do subscribe to grarpamp's position that bringing
at least a littl real pressure is bound to have some medium term
positive effects. These seems to me like logic 1-0-1!