I2P

There's no bridge of a bridge.

The only multi-hop setting in the source is for the optional I2P transport's own tunnels, up to eight hops.

That's I2P doing its thing underneath, not Cino doing it.

And the reason the number is one is a different reason than the one people assume.

It's not a security ceiling.

This week we have four items from the bitcoin core repo one major one from core lining uh a middle one from from eclair and the ones we covered from ldk as much as one from lnd let's start so first we have bitcoin core 36 277 this is about a potential transaction origin privacy leak in the experimental opt-in private broadcasting feature.

So if you remember, we covered in newsletter 388 and in newsletter 425, but mainly 388, a new feature that Bitcoin Core added where a new Boolean option called private broadcast allowed a Bitcoin Core operator to create short-lived Tor or I2P connections where they could when using the send raw transaction rpc so it base basically bitcoin core sends a transaction through a short-lived tor or i2p connection or through the tor proxy to ipv4 ipv6 spears and then closes that connection once it's done broadcasting that transaction or those transactions.

And that protects the privacy of the transaction originator by concealing their IP address and by using separate connections for each transaction to prevent linkability.

This was a main challenge that we were trying to solve for years.

So then the node would basically, would then close the pending private connection.

No, excuse me.

If your node would close the pending private connection instead of responding to the request, then the attacker could basically infer that the private broadcast attempts that originated initially the transaction is the same as the node that received the transaction because as soon as the node receives the transaction, the private connection canceled the remaining initial private broadcast attempts, right? So this is a very theoretical attack that would require an attacker to control multiple nodes and also to be inspecting the behavior of, at the same time, your private connection and your regular connection, and also kind of suspect that you are the same node behind those connections, right? So now the fix is for Bitcoin Core to always complete the three initial private broadcast attempts over Tor or I2P, even if the transaction has already propagated back to its original connection.

So, however, subsequent retries will stop as appropriate, right? So it always now completes the initial three because else, if it would have stopped it could get, its regular connection could get linked to its temporary private connection.

And funding actually balloons, eventually to $2.2 million, including Pentagon contracts.

so you might want to look into I2P as maybe as something to use instead of Tor but the thing I don't like about I2P is the fact that it's very Java centric and very fucking slow right like they're using the JVM they're using the JDK it's like it's it's slow like it doesn't have like I don't believe that there's like a rust spin-off of it and it's just like it's slow So that's like my only complaint with I2P.

So it goes on to say, is Tor actually secure? Even with open source code, Tor can't protect you from a determined government.

The 2014-15 takedowns of dark web markets and the Playpen CP ring that led to 500 arrests relied on a Carnegie Mellon exploit.

So we announced, we covered the announcement or the addition of that in Bitcoin Core in newsletter 388.

To remind listeners, this is a feature that allows a user to broadcast transactions to short-lived Tor or I2P connections or through the Tor proxy to IPv4 and IPv6 peers.

when using sendRawTransaction.

So this allows you to temporarily conceal your IP address, and it protects the privacy of you as the transaction originator when your node broadcasts your transaction.

Both visitors and the people running the sites stay anonymous by design.

Uh, access requires overlay networks such as Tor or I2P or L2P.

Have you ever heard of that?

I have not, no.