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

This is needed but there should be more insight into the current surveillance problem and how Orchid solves it. This seems to be focused on China.

Because surveillance is a potentially serious problem, it should not be used cynically to market some new product that just adds another layer but doesn't really solve the problem.

For the average person its not China or Russia but their own state that is a bigger problem as they have power over them and can interfere with activism, journalism, dissent etc. The intensive profiling by Google, Facebook and others is another problem.

Was the Internet designed to be anonymous? Governments control access and can stomp down at will. ISPs and telcos know who you are, server and vpn providers know who you are, Facebook and Google have a lot of data on you. Only the very committed and technically adept can perhaps attempt any sort of anonymity.

Something like Musk's satellites with some basic free access may perhaps be the first of many steps to some kind of anonymity.

The goal of our network is to make it so that the network is protected as much as possible from users running compromised nodes. If you are a single node, you should not be able to do anything against the network. As the number of nodes you are in the system increases, the probability you will be able to pull of various forms of attacks against users of the network also increases. We are working on documenting these security tradeoffs in detail in our whitepaper (and any attempt I make to describe them here will be less accurate and thereby dangerous ;P).

However, it is worth noting at a super-super high level that we are hoping to get a large number of nodes running the network and we have parts of our system that involve proof of work in a way similar to a cryptocurrency blockchain like Bitcoin. If a node in the Bitcoin network is operating for the purpose of compromise, it need not be banned from mining blocks: the network is designed in a way to make it so that such a node would not be able to pull off the kinds of attacks that people care about unless it owns a significant percentage of the resources being applied to securing the network. Our network has similar properties.

Sorry, but we have not yet finished writing the code for this (let's just say it: "my fault" ;P). Even I am currently unable to start and integrate a new relay into a running network; this should be fixed in the near future and we will have all of our code available as open source under the AGPL3 license, and will be working hard to build up an inclusive community around the project.

That sounds like you are thinking of maybe adding hidden services in the future, am I reading you correctly?

This sounds like a good idea. One problem with things like tor and i2p is you want to have tons of traffic so as to hide things from the various spies, but it is hard to get enough people to support nodes. Add a token and perhaps that problem will be solved.