I did know that it was possible to multihome Tor hidden services, but I didn't mention it because I have never heard of anybody actually doing it before. Also, the I2P scene is much more focused on multihoming, their community has been very involved in working on forks of tahoe-lafs for multihoming dynamic Eepsites, whereas the Tor community generally ignores multihoming all together. You are right though that multihoming is possible with Tor as well, and I should have mentioned this rather than give the impression that this feature is unique to I2P. Speaking of rarely used Tor features, it also supports authenticated access to hidden services such that clients without a specific cookie can not even determine if the hidden service is up or not. I also am aware of the hidden mode with I2P, this is also a rarely used configuration for I2P. the primary problem with operating in hidden mode is that afaik you no longer route traffic for other peers. I am not an expert in regards to I2P, but from what I can gather the developers generally suggest against running in hidden mode due to it damaging some of the anonymity providing properties of I2P. Of course it also protects from some attacks, such as intersection attacks and obviously membership enumeration. Yes definitely allowing exiting to the clearnet is required to gain a substantial user base (and all of the delicious cover traffic they bring with them). I am really torn between having all users route by default or not. Advantages of all users routing: A. The network can scale much more easily (Tor is constantly running into resource problems, I2P has an abundance of resources) B. It makes it much easier to add plausible deniability C. It opens up the possibility of having a distributed data store like Freenet, which I find very attractive D. The abundance of resources allows for heavier use of dummy traffic and other anonymity increasing, bandwidth intensive techniques E. The network is likely to grow much larger (20,000 routing nodes versus 3,000 routing nodes) which makes it harder for an attacker to monitor a large % of it Disadvantages of all users routing: A. Not as many people want to make resources available as want to consume resources. Having users route by default could lead to a much smaller overall user base, even if the number of routing nodes is larger. B. If all users route it is very likely that it will open the network up to client enumeration, and this will likely lead to weakness to various sorts of intersection attack C. If mixing is utilized, having a very large network will dilute the number of messages that mix together at any one hop, potentially significantly reducing the anonymity that can be provided by mixing Well my interest in anonymity networks predated SR and the massive SR user base by many years, so I am not really concerned with SR being the primary destination of people who use the darknet. Tor is definitely by far the most popular network though, and any new comer will have trouble even growing to the same size as Freenet or I2P. So I would say that I am brainstorming a theoretical network, but a theoretical network that would be worth building. I really do love Tor but I am entirely convinced that it is not capable of continuing to provide anonymity as the scrutiny against it increases. Simple analysis of Tor reveals that a fairly modest attacker can cause enormous damage to those who use it. We have not seen this carried out in practice yet, and we never will until we do. But looking at the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of Tor, the only conclusion I can come to is that Tor is just not something I want to continue trusting with my life. After the first wave of Tor arrests comes, and in my opinion this will be sometime in the fairly near future, perhaps in a year or two, people will look for alternatives because they will realize that Tor is actually no longer good enough. But I am interested in anonymity networks theoretically and practically, and even if nobody ever uses a superior network it is interesting enough in itself to make one. I can see merit to layering some things on top of Tor (for example a remailer network), but I think that something that is fundamentally an alternative to Tor would not make much sense to layer through Tor. I also doubt that the Tor developers have much interest in fundamentally changing their network. Right now we have low latency anonymity networks a la I2P and Tor, deniable file sharing networks a la Freenet, and high latency mix networks a la Mixminion and Mixmaster. I think that the remailer networks are so slow and unreliable and E-mail specific that hardly anybody will ever use them, that I2P and Tor are so fundamentally insecure that they will not withstand attack for much longer, and that Freenet is so unique that it files sort of a niche market (it can't be used for surfing the internet, it can't be used for E-mail to people on the clearnet, it can't be used for hosting a traditional website, etc). I think that the anonymity network of the future will be a mixture of all of these things: fast enough to surf the internet but slow enough that timing attacks can be somewhat protected from (0-3 minutes of delay total), incorporating plausible deniability as much as possible while still allowing for the clearnet to be surfed, allowing hidden services that are stored distributed through out the network like Freenet or multihomed like I2P and sometimes Tor, etc. Pretty much I think it will be Freenet in that plausible deniability will be a primary focus (because this offers strong protection and is easier to obtain than actual anonymity), Tor in that exiting to the clearnet will be possible, and Mixminion in that it will look like a greatly watered down remailer network (using the same techniques as the remailers, but to a much smaller degree, to allow for reasonable latencies). Also, I do believe that a userbase would be attracted. Now more than ever before people are taking an interest in stuff like this. Look at how quickly BitMessage got over 100 nodes. When the earliest academic papers analyzing Tor started coming out it only had a few dozen nodes.