It is also worth pointing out that Tor sort of came from the government and is still largely funded by the government, and had the original intention of anonymizing government intelligence agents. Tor is still marketed largely toward police and military users, none of their "who uses Tor" examples include "People who struggle against the state", although clearly Tor is largely focused on helping Chinese people access the internet at this point in time. Also Tor developers are mostly quite libertarian indeed, but they don't market their software as for use by anarchists and libertarians. I2P came from anarchists and they advertise it as something that can be used by militants and others who struggle against the state. On the other hand, smart as some of the hobbyist cryptoanarchists are, my general impression is that a lot of them are self taught whereas several of the Tor developers actually have Ph.Ds. Tor is very tied to the university academic culture at this point, I2P is very tied to the cryptoanarchist culture. Personally I think that the academic people tend to know what they are doing more than the cryptoanarchist people. I mean, there can be overlap between these two groups, but I see a distinct group of academic researchers (libertarian as they often are) and a distinct group of cryptoanarchists (who tend to be anarchists first and cryptographers second). You can also see a difference between them in the terminology that they use. Cryptoanarchist friends tend to call hacking around Tor to obtain an IP address a "side channel" attack, whereas people in the academic community would say "wtf, that is not a side channel attack, that is a proxy bypass attack, side channel attacks only apply to cryptosystems leaking keys via timing and power analysis etc". And a quick search finds several in the I2P community calling these side channel attacks, indeed even Whonix developer is calling them "side channel" attacks. That wouldn't fly in the Tor community, because they actually learned about the term "side channel attack" in one of their cryptography classes. Cryptoanarchists -> "side channel attacks are attacks that go around a security system rather than directly breaking it" Academic security community -> (from wikipedia) "In cryptography, a side channel attack is any attack based on information gained from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem, rather than brute force or theoretical weaknesses in the algorithms (compare cryptanalysis). For example, timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks or even sound can provide an extra source of information which can be exploited to break the system."