[tor-talk] I2P over Tor

[grarpamp]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Jeff Becker <ampernand at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Newbie I2P contributor here, I've recently been playing around with the idea
> of running I2P over Tor for purely experimental reasons. I am thinking that
> some users could still participate in routing traffic by providing a reachable
> hidden service address and optionally a publicly reachable clearnet address. I
> am pretty sure that Tor can handle a few small I2P routers but I would like to
> make sure that it will not bother the Tor network. I am unsure of how much
> bandwidth it would use, in the long run it may use a lot if people like the
> idea of I2P over/inside tor.
>
> Would this bother Tor if this was a) done on an experimental level, b) done as
> an optional mode of operation for i2p, c) default for i2p.
>
> case A is almost ready to go
> case B is a possible possibility for the future
> case C will never happen ever. Regardless, I'd like to hear thoughts on such
> systems for possible future ventures.

You could run I2P over Tor, perhaps via onion, and definitely
with onioncat. But why? Yes, layering resistance technologies
is good. But you will have no other I2P peers to connect to, for a
very long while. And it will be very slow. Same for I2P over Tor.
Now if you were to run Bittorrent or any other application layer
'network' over Tor (or I2P), IRC/NNTP/etc that would be different...
you would acquire peers fairly quickly.

Were you to ask I2P community, option 'c' will never happen.
And due to slowness as natural discouragement of 'a' and 'b',
Tor probably doesn't care since though technically possible,
it won't happen en masse anyways.
Similarly, does I2P care if Tor can route traffic over I2P?
Doubtful, but as with Bitcoin support, options in both
directions are always fun to have :)