Sovereign bitcoiners,

Bitcoin Core 23.0 was recently released, about half a year after 22.0, the version which added I2P support in addition to the popular Tor network.

I can tell from my node that 22.0 is now by far the most popular with Tor users and that I2P users are faster upgrading to 23.0. But I2P enabled nodes are still quite few I recon, as my node doesn't always have I2P connected peers, but it is still growing.

I call on to you to enable I2P, to further strengthen the Bitcoin P2P network.

I assume you already know about Tor (onion). Tor is very useful and I2P very similar, but has some properties which are orthogonal to each other, which are good reasons to be on both networks.

Tor is rather centralized. Although Tor nodes can be run by anyone, the nodes which are participate in the network are all chosen and entered into a central list of nodes. I2P on the other hand, much like Bitcoin, has nodes gossiping instead and no central servers. This means Tor can be attacked and shut down, as has happened, with downtime as the result, whereas I2P has no central points to attack.

In addition, Tor exit nodes can both censor Bitcoin nodes by simply blocking the protocol, or worse, they could "man in the middle" bitcoin connections to censor transactions from spreading to miners, spying or possibly other devious deeds. I2P doesn't solve this issue, but it doesn't have it either, because I2P doesn't have exit nodes to the rest of the Internet, as I2P provides only what's known as "hidden services" in Tor. Thus, running a routing I2P is also less of a risk, since everything is encrypted end-to-end and you're not letting anonymous users use your KYC clearnet connection.

Either way, having another network as a backup in case one has a problem, temporarily or permanently, is always a good thing. That being said, I wouldn't recommend disconnecting from Tor or IPv4/IPv6 to only use I2P, as it has much fewer nodes still.

Read about how to configure it here. You're probably going to be most happy with i2pd, as it's not Java. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/22.x/doc/i2p.md

If you're using a managed Bitcoin node distribution and the above doesn't make sense to you, please talk to your node distribution vendor about please adding I2P support next to their Tor support.