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

Be a part of making Bitcoin even more ungovernable! Join the early adopters in bootstrapping bitcoin on a redundant anonymity network to decrease reliance on Tor.

Tor is rather centralized. Although Tor nodes can be run by anyone, the nodes which participate in the network are all 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 rendered unusable for periods of time, as has happened more and more lately, whereas I2P has no central points to attack.

Lightning, especially, is vulnerable to downtime. If a tor-only node is unable to communicate due to a DDoS attack on Tor, funds can be lost/stolen. It's very important that lightning implementations reduce their reliance on a single anonymity protocol. With greater I2P adoption on the base layer, it will hopefully encourage devs to add support for lightning implementations as well.

Bitcoin Core 22.0 enabled I2P over a year ago. Here's the doc to get started: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/i2p.md

You'll want to install I2Pd (a lightweight C++ I2P implementation) instead of the bloated Java implementation. You can install I2P alongside your node (much like Tor is already) or on a separate machine accessible by IP address.

Once you have an I2P router, you can also configure a web browser to use your router as a proxy and access the hidden services on the network. Here's an excellent video for accessing darknet over I2P: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ze6S1aDJs

Tor has gained more popularity because it doesn't require running a dedicated router. Instead, users connect to relays run by volunteers. As node runners, the barrier to running an I2P router is much smaller. Online privacy is under attack and the Tor network is a huge target. Let's build our defenses and bring a second player into the ring.