deleted by creator

I am going to reply to just one of the points, so sorry for it.

I don’t know why a lot of these projects don’t have home self-hosting with dynamic IP and through NAT in mind for the services.

In the end, direct participation and support is just impossible for some.

I agree with 2 points of your conclusion though:

• motivated by financial gain
• coupled with cryptocurrency

a talk at the yearly chaos computer congress about the alt-rights online behavior titled “Let’s play Infokrieg” (the talk is in German, but I linked the version with english live translation) talks about lokinet and how the developer advertised it on 8chan. This is all the connection they mention though and it’s pretty thin Imo.

This is easy to miss in the talk, but he also hints at the fact that the protocol is called “LLARP”, which is probably a reference to “LARP” – “Live-Action Role-Playing”.

Which may also be something entirely innocuous, like people role-playing life in the Middle Ages, but especially on 8chan may also refer to role-playing as Nazis, or role-playing a first-person shooter with an actual gun in an actual mosque. (The Christchurch terrorist made his announcement on 8chan and was very much celebrated there for his high kill score.)

Under the Lokinet initiator’s announcement on 8chan, someone pointed out that “LLARP” is a funny name for that, to which the Lokinet initiator replied that they considered calling the server implementation “WIZARD”, which is itself a self-referential term for sad virgin men in the *chan-context, but also just shows that the “LLARP” acronym wasn’t accidental.

None of this is concrete evidence, but certainly too close for comfort to the usual alt-right dog-whistling bullshit (dropping words in innocuous contexts that only others in the community will recognize).

Maybe someone else can chime in that knows, but Session states the following in their FAQ which reads to me as if the crypto portion of the network isn’t yet merged with the messenger at all levels (yet). I would be curious to hear from someone else with more knowledge, as I liked the idea behind the messenger otherwise.

If the two (their coin and the messenger) are able to run together but still stay “unlinked” in regards to message content and I don’t have to hear about earning Oxen by using the service I am more inclined to consider it an option.

The Session team is hard at work fixing bugs and shoring up core messaging functionality, but once the app is working reliably, we’ll be moving on to Lokinet integration to bring voice calling functionality to Session. We’ll keep the community updated on our progress, so be sure to follow our Twitter to stay up to date!

No, your messages are not stored on a blockchain. Messages are stored by swarms, and are deleted after a fixed amount of time (called the “time-to-live”, or TTL). All of your messages are encrypted, and can only be decrypted using the private key which is stored locally on your device.

this is the guide on how to set up a service node for oxen, which was formerly called lokinet - aka this is the server run by people that does all of this:

• Receive, store, and forward encrypted Session messages
• Route Lokinet internet traffic
• Monitor other service nodes and vote on their performance
• Are called into quorums which give them authority over Blink transactions
• Produce new blocks for the network via Pulse PoS
• (added by me:) earn crypto

it can’t be run from home, like tor or i2p relay servers.

This means that all the traffic in this onion routing network will just go through a couple of datacenters instead of “all around the world”. I just believe that it’s easier for the FBI etc. to get access to datacenter machines instead of computers run at home. The upside of this of course is, that their onion routing can reach much faster speeds.

Also, as of now, their blockchain already uses 15gb of hdd space on each of the service nodes.

Like I said, the tech is kinda sweet, time will tell if it is a good concept and if it is governed properly.

Hey, i’m the CTO at Oxen, just wanted to take some time out to answer the questions/concerns in this post and related comments.

if people who are supposed to be the backbone of the onion-routing service are paid to do this I worry that in some (maybe new and still unknown) way this will weaken the network in comparison to a network run by volunteers and users (like tor and i2p). Maybe this will favor larger servers so all of the onion-routing is done in “the cloud” and none from home which in result is easier to surveil.

Actually we think that the cryptocurrency aspect of things improves the networks ability to resist really common attacks like Sybil attacks and generally improves the quality of the nodes added to the network. Sybil attacks for example are much more expensive on Lokinet, since each Service Node operator needs to stake 15,000 Oxen to start a new Service Node, which is approximately $17,000 USD. Particularly it creates a feedback loop where the more Oxen that is bought off the market and locked into Service Nodes, the more expensive it becomes to buy more Oxen and lock it into Service Nodes. The other main advantage is we can enforce desirable network behavior by locking a Service Node’s stake, which means we can create a fairly large network of always online, high bandwidth nodes https://oxendashboard.com/#4 . We think this is an advantage over I2P, which is a larger network, but is mostly comprised of low bandwidth and low reliability nodes which exacerbates performance issues. Although your points about most Service Nodes running inside of data centers is true, we must ask the question as to whether we can build a viable, widely used onion routing network just using personal computers and residential internet connections? to me it seems that the need for high bandwidth onion routing has outweighed the need for lower bandwidth routing as evidenced by the adoption levels of Tor vs I2P, considering that most Tor routers also run inside data centers.

a talk at the yearly chaos computer congress about the alt-rights online behavior titled “Let’s play Infokrieg” (the talk is in German, but I linked the version with english live translation) talks about lokinet and how the developer advertised it on 8chan. This is all the connection they mention though and it’s pretty thin Imo.

This is incorrect, that post where Jeff, the primary developer of Lokinet is promoting Lokinet is actually on Endchan not 8Chan/8Kun. We don’t have any association with the alt right, and the non-for-profit that develops Lokinet https://optf.ngo is fairly apolitical mostly focusing on defending human rights and furthering privacy enhancing technologies.

it’s in the hands of people nobody knows

We don’t really make an effort to hide the team or anything, many of us have public profiles, an out of date list of some of our team members can be found here https://loki.network/team/

Under the Lokinet initiator’s announcement on 8chan, someone pointed out that “LLARP” is a funny name for that, to which the Lokinet initiator replied that they considered calling the server implementation “WIZARD”, which is itself a self-referential term for sad virgin men in the *chan-context, but also just shows that the “LLARP” acronym wasn’t accidental.

This is pure coincidence, LLARP stands for Low Latency Onion Routing Protocol, i forget what WIZARD stood for but it was something similarly onion routing related. We aren’t designing protocol names to dogwhistle to alt-right groups.

has anyone used session?

You seems to have a prejudice with crypto, with profit incentives and in general, people that don’t think like you…

Cryptocurrencies are at this moment being implemented in way to many use cases to name here, for things like preventing your hard earned money to slowly dissapear via inflation and for making transactions basically. Is a tremendous missconception the idea that “speculation” is a bad. Thanks good people speculate all the time, like what youre doing with this post “speculating” or thinking about posible outcomes of a re-implementation of i2p, the acurate your speculation is, higher the chamce of success of the project

Financial incentives are probably the most powerfull incentives to coordinate people who doesnt know each other and (probably didn’t ever like each other) Is not an odeological position, it just a fact.

In your favor you do have a point if you are worried about centralization, that was basically what happend to bitcoin though there are ways to prevent that and at the same time have have the powerfulls incentives for people to participate in the network and share their resources, given the fast loosing of privacy online it doesnt look like a good idea ignore solutions on an ideological basis. Probably the best path fordware is woth more iterations, tryal and error, the more projects out there with different and creative approaches, the better. Sooner or later something will stick