Just a PSA that I2P exists if you want to try out anonymous torrenting. Head over to I2P for questions on how to set it up.
We won’t answer questions that could get us into legal trouble, but I’d be happy to help with more generic I2P things.
There’s also a guide on how to use I2P together with BiglyBT for example
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@CAVOK Anonymous torrenting? Is this a fever dream?
Nope, and it’s awesome. I2P works similarly to tor except instead of being discouraged, there’s a torrent client built in. Only down side is as it’s an entirely P2P network with alot of hops (more than tor) it’s quite slow.
Can we use a classic torrent client such as transmission instead of the built in client? What about the Soulseek network over IP2 with an open-source client such as Nicotine? Thank you.
I don’t think there’s a soulseek i2p. As for regular torrent clients there are a few. BiglyBT, Transmission-i2p (abandoned but functional), XD, libtorrent - if you’re a programmer, qtorrent etc.
Thank you for the clarification.
My pleasure.
It’s slow. Fundamentally to send a packet of data to someone you need to know where to send it.
So there are two options:
- Maintain a trust network for allowed peers who you can guarantee won’t snitch - like private trackers, and then use direct connections freely
- Send it via intermediaries who don’t give a shit about being exposed (e.g. VPN services, or i2p out proxies)
But with the intermediaries approach your speed will always be bottlenecked by the slowest of the intermediaries.
@nivenkos
Not necessarelly. There is also the option to increase the number of concurrent connection. This may have some negative side effect on anonymisity, but probably not enought that it should be a source of worry for torrenting (as there are multiple connection at a time, via different server).Actually, triber is onion routing made specifically for torrent. And it works pretty well.
@pasci_lei
No, it works well but the downside as mentioned below is speed. I’ve seen speeds in the MBit range, but that’s very rare. Usually around 300-500 kBits for me.
Perhaps BiglyBT is faster? I don’t know. I only use the one built in.
PSA that I2P is a whole darknet, not just some anonymizing torrent client. It comes with an IRC relay (or some such; words aren’t working great at the moment) and a webserver too.
Yes, but also no. The plugin for BiglyBT for example isn’t a whole darknet, it’s just a way to torrent over I2P. But if you install the router then yes, it does come with the things you say, however they’re very configurable so it’s quite easy to turn on or off.
