Yes, I find this interesting aswell, particularly the decentralized bit. It’s not really anything like Freenet, where anonymity is actually the primary goal. That is the point I think – not address anonymity. You would of course need a few “superpeers” to bootstrap things, but once it got going it would be self-maintaining. There is no address anonymity as far as I can see – it is simply decentralized. Tribler does not seem to even try to behave like a darknet. Its fine to a point for a small group of peers who actually do know each other – but then you never really gain the advantages you have with large P2P networks (namely diverse content and multiple seeders to speed up downloads). As such, it is all rather pointless to me, since they eventually succumb to their own popularity – once you reach the point that you no longer know everyone you can no longer trust it. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s take on this subject.ĭarknets for file sharing are simply trust networks – they are only as trustworthy as the people you let into them. And it tends to create very long if not completely broken routes between members who exchange peer information in the IRC channels at different times. In practice, the freenet darknet between anonymous users is practically useless because users go to a clear IRC channel to exchange peer lists, which is far less secure than the previous freenet since it leaks even more information than before. So, the state wouldn’t have a way to identify peers by simply joining the network. This has/had so many obvious scalability problems that it was a terrible idea from the get-go in my opinion, but it was supposed to allow peers to operate with much better confidence that no one outside the trusted peers would know that they’re part of the network. The principal difference is that this protocol does not exchange peers, and the user must enter “trusted” peers manually. They developed a new freenet protocol and called it the “dark net”.

This enabled one to get IPs of peers in the network, which was considered a security problem in regimes like china where the simple fact of running an anti-censorship technology can land someone in trouble. However the fact that the network exchanged peer information to repair and optimize the network implies that an attacker can join the network and build a list of peers over time. The old freenet network was an example of this type of design. As long as enough peers are online, the network has a very good chance to recover itself. Once bootstrapped with some initial peers, the network can expand by itself to learn new peers. “Pure P2P” systems need to be boot strapped somehow.

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