- It doesn’t make you anonymous. Torrent protocol wasn’t designed with anonymity in mind and there are a million ways you’re going to leak your actual IP address.
- Tor is a TCP only network.
- While this doesn’t give you the anonymity you wanted, it will hurt the network for other users.
I2P is a P2P darknet. on tor the network is run by volenteers (~6000 nodes) while on I2P everyone on the nerwork is a node, and their are no built in exit nodes (in i2p their called outproxies). the official I2P router has a built in torrent client as well. like torrents the more people on i2p the faster the network, while the opposite is true for tor.
It is a different anonymity network, which works differently in many aspects.
I2P and Tor comparison: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor
I2P on Bittorrent (mostly a client dev guide, but has some interesting info): https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent
Currently BiglyBt supports I2P and it has been that way for quite some time.
If you use qBittorrent, I2P support will come in version 4.6. you can try it out now with the published release candidate version. Probably other clients are working on it too as the support is coming from the libtorrent programming library, which is used by other clients too.
Right now, I2P is quite slow in my experience, in terms of loading I2P websites. I hope that it’s just a misconfiguration on my part, or that these specific sites I tried are just overloaded.
…
Near as I can tell:
Tor is about privacy (and is prone to being compromised but…). So long as the exit nodes are in “friendly” countries and are run by trustworthy individuals (…), you are “safe”. And that is why it is popular among journalists. The downside being that a lot of heinous shit is done on Tor and those exit nodes are potentially liable for them.
I2P is about avoiding censorship. Everyone is an exit node and cops kicking down doors doesn’t significantly hurt the network.
But… I would very much NOT use that for torrenting. Because the endpoints can still be detected and recorded. And “I wasn’t downloading that Tay Swizzle concert, I was just letting potentially thousands of other people use my computer to download it… Why did you suddenly start laughing and talking about The Pirate Bay?”.
And that also ignores the “darker” parts of the dark web. Where, rather than getting a letter from the MPAA you get a visit from Chris Hansen.
It is not true that every node is an exit node in I2P. The I2P protocol does not officially have exit nodes—all I2P communication terminates at some node within the I2P network, encrypted end-to-end. It is possible to run a local proxy server and make it accessible to other users as an I2P service, creating an “exit node” of sorts, but this is something that must be set up deliberately; it’s not the default or recommended configuration. Users would need to select a specific I2P proxy service (exit node) to forward non-I2P traffic through and configure their browser (or other network-based programs) to use it.
I2P doesn’t really have exit nodes. You can only browse within the I2P network.