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Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

orchidprotocol.com

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Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#61

Post by twelvechairs »

saurik wrote: post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

I'll bite with the simple one - How is this different from Tor?

(IMO this and the 'how do you plan to make money for investors' should be in the FAQ)

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#62

Post by kunimu »

floatboth wrote: post #54
anotheryou wrote: post #2

buzzwords I see. what does it do?

Like Tor, but with capitalism. Financial incentive for running relays.

It's worth noting that a financial incentive does not necessarily equal capitalism; if one were employing wage labour then it would constitute a capitalist system, as the M-C-M' circuit would be fulfilled.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#64

Post by saurik »

twelvechairs wrote: post #61
saurik wrote: post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

I'll bite with the simple one - How is this different from Tor? (IMO this and the 'how do you plan to make money for investors' should be in the FAQ)

There are a number of differences (which one might say would take an entire whitepaper to describe ;P), but as one high-level and in my mind very interesting example, Tor actually is a centralized service where nine directory servers are able to decide the state of the network; we are accepting nothing less than a fully-decentralized system.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#65

Post by g_simonsson »

jampekka wrote: post #43
g_simonsson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully not! Ideally token allocations are fair and do not skew ownership towards any individual or entity while still providing good incentives (we're still working on figuring out what good allocations look like)

Are there any public details on the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens? Sorry for nagging, but I'm one of those skeptical of greedy people acting maximally greedy saving the world as a process waste. Edit: typo

The main reason there's currently not more details around the SAFT and the token model/allocations is that it would distract from the overall project and tech, given the current hype of blockchains and tokens.

There's certainly economic incentives for all participants, and what I find interesting is that since we're open sourcing all the code, anyone can easily deploy another network with a different token (model).

This puts pressure on us to propose fair token model/allocations else we risk disruption by forks or simply new Orchid networks.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#66

Post by woodandsteel »

saurik wrote: post #32
woodandsteel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this anonymous like tor or i2p? if so, how do you do it?

That is a very broad question that I keep looking back to and thinking "I'll answer other questions and get back to this one ;P", but I'm thinking maybe I should simply refer you to the almost 50-page whitepaper on our website. I am here to answer any questions you might still have (and I totally believe you will, as that whitepaper is a draft)! https://orchidprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf

The whitepaper is way over my head

How about a more specific question. If someone uses Orchid to accesse a website, can the website identify their IP address?

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#67

Post by saurik »

zzalpha wrote: post #20
saurik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edit: When I wrote this answer, the person I was responding to had not yet added "or Tor".) Freenet builds its own domain of content where people post websites that are hosted in a distributed fashion by the platform. What we are working on with this initial implementation is a fully-decentralized tunneling service to access existing content posted on the internet (so if you were to compare it to an existing technol…

So what are the benefits over Tor?

There are a number of differences (which one might say would take an entire whitepaper to describe ;P), but as one high-level and in my mind very interesting example, Tor actually is a centralized service where nine directory servers are able to decide the state of the network; we are accepting nothing less than a fully-decentralized system.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#69

Post by saurik »

woodandsteel wrote: post #66
saurik wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very broad question that I keep looking back to and thinking "I'll answer other questions and get back to this one ;P", but I'm thinking maybe I should simply refer you to the almost 50-page whitepaper on our website. I am here to answer any questions you might still have (and I totally believe you will, as that whitepaper is a draft)! https://orchidprotocol.com/whitepaper.pdf

The whitepaper is way over my head How about a more specific question. If someone uses Orchid to accesse a website, can the website identify their IP address?

The website will see the IP address of the exit node connecting to it, not the IP address of the user connecting to the network. You can then ask the question "what if the people running the website are also running nodes on this network and are actively attempting to do various forms of information correlation attacks including active experiments on the traffic flow", then I really am going to have a hard time accurately summarizing the whitepaper.

However, I see now that I didn't bother answering your first question, due to the complexity of the second ;P.

> Is this anonymous like tor or i2p?

The answer to this question is "yes", though we are aiming to be even better than those projects (in different ways).

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#70

Post by woodandsteel »

throwawaysml wrote: post #18
woodandsteel wrote: post #8

The FAQ says "Bandwidth contributors simply install Orchid and activate their Internet connected device as a node - either as a relay or proxy - and then they set permissions like sites they want to blacklist or whitelist, and they earn tokens into their Orchid wallet for sharing their bandwidth." So hopefully the blacklisting will eliminate the problem of nasty content that plagues anonymous networks like Tor.

For that purpose I would think optional whitelisting would make more sense. Instead of spyware lists you subscribe to in uBlock Origin, you would subscribe to a vetted, whitelist of known to be generally acceptable Orchid content. Others might want to have empty filter list to be a complete transit/peer. Therefore I don't think there's much room for users who want to blacklist but are not rather looking for a whiteli…

That makes sense, the priority is whitelists, not blacklists.
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